let me introduce you to my guest house out back
points at 1997 jeep wrangler
i put a sleeping bag in it just for you
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a house i lived in in college had a guest house out back that was a dead volvo filled with tecate 24 pack boxes
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Moonlight & Mistletoe (2008) - A young woman escapes from the family business, she thinks she’ll never have to go back there again. Until one day she recieves a postcard in the mail, signed with a familiar name… Remember that place? I’ll see you again, in Santaville, the 365-days-a-year open air Christmas diorama and crafts emporium.
In this case Santaville is the family business and her father, Tom Arnold, is combination smalltown business tyrant and Santa Prime. When he gets into a sleigh accident trying to impress a lady the daughter is forced to return to her childhood role as “number one Elf”, only to find the whole thing is at risk of going under due to unpaid debt.
I guess christmas movies about failing businesses that the community gathers around etc are enough of a standby it’d be inevitable that Hallmark ended up recycling them, but the echo of an echo of like, depression era class rage as filtered through Capra movies and knockoffs of those movies is kind of a strange residue to encounter in this context, especially with the additional context of this movie coming out in 2008. So the scenes of the head of the bank complacently explaining that “around here we all love our Santa” while still refusing to extend credit, or of the dad asking “Can people really do this kind of thing? Just waltz in and take someones hope because of a stupid piece of paper?” feel more unsettled and less conciliatory than usual. There’s also an evil financial advisor trying to sell out the town to a ski resort, and the way you know he’s evil is that he mentions how he used to open his presents on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day. (He is eventually exiled from Santaville with the very Castlevania-ish line of “Your heartless soul is not welcome here anymore!” Fight or perish like the dog you are!)
I think another unexpected echo of those earlier films is that the Santa Dad is an almost daemonic presence, by the standards of Hallmark films at least. After his wife died “he changed… it was like the only way he could handle was to go all Santa, all the time” - we see flashbacks where he refuses to acknowledge his daughter because “Santa doesn’t have children”, we see him fly into a rage while yelling things like “If I lose Santaville I have NOTHING!” I mean it’s also Tom Arnold so there’s inherently an extra level of sleazy weirdness to this guy as the beloved family patriarch. Sad we missed out on the timeline where Billy Drago started turning up in this kind of film as a loveable grandpa but I guess there’s still hope for Michael Ironside to get pulled in.
Anyway as expected Santaville is saved by a combination of individual charity and entrepeneurial capitalist savvy (Santa gets a web presence!). The main lady pairs off with a hardworking carpenter who, it is revealed, fled his life on the corporate career track in part due to a chance encounter with her in Santaville as a teen. Now he saves the day by selling his handcrafted “nutcrackers” for $500 apiece, although they’re not actually nutcrackers since the mouth doesn’t open, I guess they’re just little wooden guys? There’s a creepy moment at the end where they kiss under the mistletoe and then she announces to the crowd that “next year there’ll be another elf in Santaville”. The other highlight of the business arc is when she makes a pr campaign for Santaville that just consists of leaving a slip of paper with the word “REMEMBER…” written on it at the homes and shop windows of the town. I guess the implication is that it calls them all back to better days but if this happened to me I’d think I was being stalked by a giallo villain.
Other things:
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This movie has a truly bizarre soundtrack that intrudes from time to time. Pride of place obviously goes to the dour midi version of Greensleeves but I also enjoyed the slight funk pastiche in the train station and the part where an emotional moment was soundtracked like a christmas level of Mischief Makers (did i dream this?).
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One of the other Santas is an avuncular elderly ex-lawyer. When the unscrupulous contract is handed to him to look over we see a shot of him staring at it at his desk after work while rubbing his temples, and then the next day when they ask him if the contract looks OK he gives the single least trustworthy reply I’ve ever heard by staring goggle-eyed a few seconds and then going “Uhhhhhhhhhhh… yeah?”. I thought this would all be a way of indicating that he was planning some kind of scheme involving switched contracts or something that would save the day - but it turns out he just kind of spaced out and wasn’t able to read the contract after all, but was still embarrassed to tell anybody. The worst fucking lawyer!! But in a relateable way.
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One way the movie indicates Times Have Changed is by having one of the kids visiting Santaville request “an Omegatron 6000 with all five levels and multiplayer access grid” in addition to “a Zeon Command Cube but its gotta have the shuffle feature for all 83 games”. Games in culture!
Anyway… not to read too much into things but it was interesting that this 2008 Hallmark movie seemed both conceptually and aesthetically weirder (the music!) than their more modern ones have been allowed to be, and how it also ended up being weirdly hornier than the later movies too (which is to say: in addition to having two(!) parts where characters vaguely allude to making babies, the dad’s love interest is more how you say milfy than the carefully respectable and desexualised ladies that exist to get paired off with the widowed father character of later films). I guess the plot involves a sense of betrayal by both the impersonal forces of the economy and by modern culture as a whole - kids these days don’t care about Santa, all they want is Zeon Command Cube - and the way they deal with this is to explicitly cast Santaville as a nostalgic time bubble of better times where the nightmare of history can just be waited out. So a certain sense of melancholy, in watching this retreat play out both in the movie itself and also reflected to an extent across the last decade of the already hyper-circumscribed Hallmark kulturindustrie as a whole. But what can ya do… The mayor calls to ask me my will, the chief of police says that no-one was killed. Nowhere I go gets me farther from Santaville.
Anyway, merry xmas to all and hope everyone’s enjoying their Command Cube in the holiday season. 
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The Terminal (2004) - Found a list of New Year’s-related romcoms and the choice was between this and a Sandra Bullock movie about falling in love with a coma patient. Always go with coma patient!! Especially as this one turned out to neither be New Year’s-related nor a romcom, really, although it feels like a romcom which is the important thing - if I had to describe what that means it would be of a comedy with no jokes, one that consists entirely of unknowable grotesques just doing everyday things while zippy music plays. But to be honest I’ve been meaning to watch this for a while and since this year my partner was finally released from visa limbo it seemed like as good a time as any.
Following up on his role in Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks stars in this movie as a man bravely struggling to deal with a lifelong case of Borat Disease. After a coup in his home country and surrounded by officials who do not understand the symptoms of his medical condition (propensity to smash things, break out in vaguely european sounding shrieks and mumbles with no prompting, total inability to pick up on gestures or body language etc) he ends up stuck in an american airport for “unspecified period of time”.
It might seem weird at first that a movie with this premise would also contain no indications or references as to how long he’s actually been here (long enough to learn English, become an aquantance or friend of every single airport worker, craft a wall-size mural out of pieces of broken plate, etc). It might also seem weird that there’s almost none of the specific texture of airports here, none of the things that make them unsettling and distinctive as spaces (long, empty tunnels and corridors, the way they constantly slide between feeling busy and abandoned, the heavily processed-feeling air, the weird tedium of every airport store, etc). But this is because emphasizing any of the actual discomforts or miseries of the situation would detract from its true function as a kind of Bush-era liberal propaganda. The Tom Hanks character must remain a perpetually goodnatured everyman (though foreign) in order to emphasise the warm humanistic message of “ordinary people” eventually triumphing over petty, bureaucratic airport officials. And the way to do this? By courageously refusing to break the rules - not sneaking out when they ostentatiously leave the door open in front of him, not lying in order to claim status as an asylum seeker (that famously easy loophole for entering the States!). Through his decent rule-abidingness he wins over all his erstwhile opponents, a timely political message for our age.
I would say the main advantage this movie has over Sorkin stuff with essentially the same theme is that here it’s warped through all kinds of crazed Spielbergian schmaltz - since you miss 100% of the plays for emotional reaction you don’t make, there are all kinds of sudden lurches into different tones and genres whenever things start to slow down. So although the Hanks character won’t lie to save himself, he will lie to help someone else get his father’s heart medicine through customs in a tense hostage negotiation scene, and by putting one over on The Man he also becomes a kind of underground culture hero to all the airport workers, who use his handprint as an icon of defiance by hanging it up behind the counter at the airport Burger King, etc. (The category of “everyone who works in or around the airport” is here treated as implying membership of a sort of extended peasant commune, where everyone knows and talks to and performs quests for one another, has a barter economy based on lost-and-found items, etc… just like the society of Lost Boys in ‘Hook’??).
So he’s simultaneously the guy whose decency and respect for the rules end up winning all the airport cops to his side, but also the rebel whose defiance of the security state makes him a hero to all the workers. And he’s also a can-do entrepeneurial hustler whose melting pot ingenuity is constantly butting against liberal rules and ordinances (he starts out collecting trolleys for change to get food for eat, but after they stop him he becomes an off-the-books construction worker for $19 an hour instead). And the cops in the movie are an ominous controlling presence, except they’re all also nice guys who are rooting for him, and it’s the head of security who’s the bad guy. But even then it isn’t necessarily the office which is bad, as the retiring head of security has a line about “sometimes you have to ignore the rules, ignore the numbers and concentrate on the people… compassion, that’s the foundation of this country.” So I guess the political message of the movie is really “wouldn’t it suck if this one guy decided to be an asshole to Tom Hanks”, and having watched it I can say, “I guess??” A powerful statement for our times. Well, maybe you had to be there.
ANYWAY. Now to the important part which is the romance!! Catherine Zeta Jones is a flight attendant and the thing about flight attendants is that, as another character in the movie helpfully points out, “flying between time zones does something to their biological clocks… they’re always ready for sex.” And you might think this is a goofy joke but within the movie it’s kind of implicitly treated as correct?? Because no sooner has she broken up with her boyfriend than she meets Tom Hanks, appears enthralled and turned on by his presence, starts asking him for dates etc, and to repeat this is a guy who talks and acts like Borat, has been living in an airport for months on end subsisting on Burger King and free crackers, wearing the same handful of goofy floral shirts all that time. But then later there’s a reveal where she manages to get him a one-day visa to NYC and then implies she got it through having sex with “someone in a high place” in Washington and then she walks off and kind of disappears from the movie. ??? Anyway her personality type is horny and loving Napoleon and every time they meet she says something like “Do you know what Napoleon gave Josephine the first night they met” “Do you know what was the last thing Napoleon said to Josephine before Waterloo” “Do you know how the croissant was invented” etc. And Tom Hanks appears unduly charmed by all this, so I don’t know, maybe they’re just two people with very specific types.
This movie is 2 hours long and completely crazed and cursed for the entirety of the running time so I will just list some of the other stuff as bullet points.
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There’s an Oblivion sidequest ass plot where he has to act as the romantic go-between for a cafeteria worker and a border guard played by Zoe Saldana, after a while of finding out what she likes (she is a Trekkie!) things come to a peak and he delivers her a wedding ring at her desk along with the extremely romantic line “He waits for you to answer, at Sbarro”. And then we cut to the guy at Sbarro and she walks up and does the vulcan peace sign at him… and then… slowly rotates her hand to reveal that she’s wearing the ring…!! This feels like something an Achewood character would come up with in a fugue state and I enjoyed it very much.
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The flight attendant talks about how her ex enjoyed crossword puzzles and the Tom Hanks character replies “this man has you… why he need puzzle”. Bold callout of a specific five-year period of indie games.
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At one point someone claims that the character Tom Hanks plays is a CIA asset, possibly referencing the theory that the real-life Tom Hanks is also a CIA asset.
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His main initially stated reason for coming to New York in the first place is to see Cats. Though he never does, there is a happy ending to this subplot as Cats has been available to watch on DVD from April 2020.
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This was all filmed on an enormous constructed airport set, which is also filled with detailed life-size prop versions of real-world chain stores and restaurants such as Burger KIng, Borders, Sbarros, etc. The conceptually unsettling nature of these detailed mimetic reproductions of completely interchangeable non-spaces acts as an “easter egg” for all the Jean Baudrillard heads in the audience.
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Tom Hanks’ refusal to break the rules inspires the airport police chief to break the rules by letting him into the country, but it also inspires an elderly indian janitor to attack an airplane with a mop, meaning the janitor will now be deported back to serve a seven-year prison sentence for stabbing a policeman but delaying the plane enough for Tom Hanks to leave the airport(?). The weird and mostly unstated ways the movie’s equivalent to political action has to be deferred and mediated through multiple layers of rule-obedience and rule-evasion is maybe the most interesting thing about it but also one of the more depressing, which is saying something.
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I hope it’s okay if I make my own contribution!
SNOWMANCE (2017)
When I first heard that this movie was about a snowman that comes to life to capture the heart of the woman lead, I thought it was going to be a literal CG snowman like Frosty taking her out on dates, with jokes about getting “snowjobs” and such. Unfortunately, it’s just a snowman who turns into a human man instead. This was a very disappointing discovery, but we still watched it.
Anyway, we start when the two leads are kids, after the woman protag is left burned by her crush. Her best friend, who we immediately know she’ll end up with, tries to cheer her up by making a snowman together based on attributes her dream man would have. We then see a montage of them doing this every Christmas (taking a selfie with the snowman each time) until we come to the modern day.
The lead is now a journalist for a local newspaper in her tiny town, which of course looks like it makes way more money than it realistically could. The lead DOES seem to still live with her dad, though, which is the most realistic thing about this movie.
Anyway, she just broke it off with another guy she wasn’t happy with, meaning she’ll be single once again over Christmas, which as we all know is the worst fate to befall a woman. Her dad tries to inspire her by telling her once again about the time he met her mother in France and had a magical whirlwind romance, instantly giving her daughter unrealistic expectations. He also gives her the scarf her mother was wearing on the day they met, obviously an item very precious to him.
She then meets the male lead (a cartoonist) out the front to make their yearly snowman, all the while with him making “I’m right here!!!” eyes at her as she goes on about just wanting to find a decent guy, who is also ripped and can take her on adventures around the world. Perhaps making these snowmen based on her fantastical expectations isn’t the best thing for you to do, cartoonist. Okay, look, I agree you shouldn’t just settle for someone, but life isn’t a magical romantic comedy! Except in this movie!
I forgot to mention that she has never left the town and was hoping the paper would open a travel section for her because she desperately wants to go somewhere else. Apparently just going on a holiday is out of the question. Anyway, those are the two main elements of our lead’s personality; desperately wanting to find a man and desperately wanting to travel. I checked, and yes, this was written by a man.
The night ends with her wishing upon a star to not be single on Christmas and she finishes off the snowman by putting the PRECIOUS FAMILY HEIRLOOM scarf on it and just leaving it out there, proving she is a bad person who doesn’t care about her parents.
The next day, their snowman goes mysteriously missing BUT a hunky dory guy knocks on their door to return the scarf (proving he cares more about her parents than she does) and he asks her out.
This begins a series of whirlwind dates, beginning with the snowman picking her up in a horse and carriage as he regales her with stories of his adventures as an… adventure guide.
The snowman has a very child like personality, and gets excitable very easily. The big missed opportunity here is that there aren’t many jokes about him being a snowman transformed into a human. There is a bit where he freaks out when the journo has carrots with her dinner (it’s not clear if he’s horrified or horny), another bit where he’s the only one who gets too hot around an outdoor fire (which is just an excuse to show off his shirtless body), and another bit where he’s caught having a conversation with other snowmen, but apart from these and a few other tiny moments he’s just played as a manchild. Like, this could actually be a pretty fun little comedy if it was written by more creative/talented writers. Or ones being paid more to care.
Anyway, the rest of the movie is the cartoonist being snarky about the snowman (and basically a bit of a dick in general), especially since he was teamed up with the journo to draw cartoons for her article about modern dating in the town, so has to follow them around all the time. Talk about awkward! Also, the journo’s friend tags along who is the goofy comic relief, the main running gag being that she made too much turkey jerky and keeps offering it to people.
At one point they have a snow sculpture competition. The snowman of course makes the more technically impressive sculpture but it’s also really boring, CLEARLY the santa jaws snow shark the cartoonist made with the comic relief is the better of the two, I mean look at this and judge for yourself:
Anyway at the end, she’s about to go off with the snowman to live a life of adventure but then has a change of heart when she sees the article and all the illustrations are of the cartoonist and her being all lovey dovey. Her dad also tells her that the Paris romance with her mum was shortlived and that the real love began when they came home to live a normal life, something he should have told her MUCH EARLIER so she didn’t have such unrealistic expectations. Thanks, dad, you dick. Oh, there is also some message about compromising in relationships and stuff and not needing to leave home, basically this is all small town propaganda.
So of course she goes back and ends up with the cartoonist dude. But then the final scene raises so many questions. We see the snowman, back in actual snow form, out in the front yard again, left alone, with his eyes sparkling to show a soul inside.
It’s implied he grew up watching her all his life as a snowman and fell in love with her. Is he now cursed to live forever as a snowman, watching her with another love like in Being John Malkovich? To live an eternity alone in a void? OR if she went with him at the end of the movie, would they both turn into snow people and be trapped in a void together, and this was secretly a horror movie the whole time?
Much to consider.
Anyway, don’t watch this.
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oh man of course hallmark has a dedicated political action committee named HallPAC
what the fuck, is hallmark really owned by a guy named Donald Hall
gah
3 seconds into watching this guy speak now absolutely convinced that the hallmark complex is home to an elaborate Gor style fantasy sex cult on the part of the senior executives and that they all wear the little hallmark logo crowns while they’re at it
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Connie & Carla (2004): well, this is a movie written by and starring nia vardalos which is not a romantic comedy, or not really. but i watched and figured i should post here on the basis that it contains some of the same themes and iconography from her other body of work (auteur theory). for one thing her then-husband ian gomez appears in it as a pathetic little worm man who has to watch as nia makes out with yet another taller hunk. and for another thing the entire movie seems to have just been devised as an elaborate excuse for doing whatever she really wanted to do at that moment, in this case, getting to sing more-earnest-than-expected showtune numbers and hang out with Debbie Reynolds. I truly respect that she was able to turn the unexpected success of the Big Fat Greek Wedding series into 10 years of getting to indulge her weirdest instincts, like the chaotic good version of cameron crowe.
in this case it’s maybe not good but it does at least feel chaotic, the plot is that nia and toni collette are lounge singers who witness a gang murder and so must go undercover by pretending to be drag queens. there are no prizes for guessing whether their ultimate tearful confession will end up being celebrated by their new drag act friends because it means they’re “coming out of the closet” and “accepting who they really are”. the scenes where they blow everyone at the club away with their talent for showtunes are pretty funny because… i’m not an expert but do people really go to these events to hear songs from Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar delivered worshipfully by people who are standing stock still. also the club scenes are very engaging in themselves because it’s a 2004 movie and so everyone is dressed like a default Sim. there is a scene where all the gay friends appear to redecorate their apartment but in this case this just means “putting a blanket on the couch and lighting one candle”. maybe the bar was just that low at the time.
david duchovny is the love interest and plays an uptight financial advisor (in 2004…), one of those characters who is kind of obnoxiously judgmental but who we know are meant to be sympathetic because they’re not the character who refers to people as freaks in a whispered voice while standing 2ft away from them. i would say my favourite recurring gag in the film was that every time nia runs into him she physically belts into him at fullspeed and sends him sprawled on the floor (my second favourite was when the mob guy sent to look for the protagonists ends up being stuck watching eternal consecutive productions of ‘Mame’). there are some earnest afterschool special scenes about learning to respect his drag act brother but i know the part that will live in my memory will be the one where nia stands around in vague annoyance as five gay men handle what they think are her fake breasts. so not her best but still a valid entry in the canon. “a man of genius can make no mistakes, his errors are volitional and act as portals of discovery” - james joyce, ulysses.
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yeah this fucking thing wow
my partner found out about it a few months ago and she basically woke me up in the middle of the night like she had to tell someone
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Desperately need to gaywatch this
Me, You, Madness (2021) - I watched this fucking movie!! It feels like I was ricocheted up at least a couple of operating thetan levels in the process but I did it. If I had to hypothesize just how it came about, without knowing the actual backstory, it would be like… imagining a theatrically snobby posh teenager who likes to say things like “i’m not racist, i hate everybody equally”, except one day she does so in the presence of an irritable witch and so is cursed to be freaky fridayed into the body of a grown woman. and then she decides to make the best of this crazy situation by following her dream of producing the script she wrote in middle school about a theatrically snobby genius serial killer girlboss who does multiple dance numbers to famous 80s pop songs in between breaking the fourth wall by speaking snarkily into the camera about all the conventions she’s breaking and movies she’s referencing. also, as result of the curse, she is also now married to former treasury secretary steven mnuchin. despite this admittedly large caveat i think i found this one too crazily fanfic-ish to hate. it felt like somebody invented kevin smith for horsegirls.
the plot such as it is is more or less just a vehicle for conveying information about this character. In the first three minutes of the movie she caresses and then eats a spider (or at least someone caresses it, since the credits list a “spider hand model”). soon afterwards we discover she also: owns the car from 2002 James Bond movie Die Another Day; goes to therapy simply for the sake of proving that she is smart enough to “hide her madness” (I too have often felt that Hannibal Lector was insufficiently girlboss); is a rich hedge fund manager BUT did NOT come from money (interestingly unlike the writer/director/star, whose family owns a castle); is aware of the movie American Psycho but insists that this is not a rip off because “women are having a moment right now”; says everything in the same fussy Edinburgh accent; speaks fluent Mandarin; has an IQ of 173; masturbates in the shower to the dow jones; and has a weird attachment to completely inexpressive himbo figures.
the male character’s reaction is to call his crime friend and announce “chad, it’s a twofer. she’s a total milf”. other pertinent information about him: at one point her office cringing assistant is calling her on the phone to inform her that “renegade x games” stock has gone down 25%. but the male lead advises him not to sell on the basis that “war of eons 3” is coming out soon along with some kind of multiplayer title. she responds “oh. my. god. you’re a GAMER?!”. perhaps this is the moment when she fell for his charms… i feel like i also need to call out the sound design of this thing in particular as being weirly compelling because all the scenes where she works out are soundtracked with hanna barbara ass cartoon BOING sound effects, and in at least one case, the scooby doo running sound.
after that it’s like… maybe less a movie and more a videogame, in the sid meier sense of “a series of interesting decisions”. there’s a long sequence where the male lead gets to dance alone in the house to “i’m so excited”, including some peekaboo moves around a pole that read very weirdly without anyone else around. there’s a long, long, loooooong sequence of the main character talking into the camera about what weapons she means to use to kill him, and which are off limits from being used in movies before, and she lists all the movies she can think of that have e.g. a gun in them (including doing a kind of slow mo accent thing for “the matrix”), while a list of those movies rolls down the screen, and then she pulls out a pair of nunchucks and talks about the bruce lee movies they’re in, while spinning them arbitrarily in a way liable to cause self harm, and then it cuts to a body double doing elaborate nunchuck spins for a full minute from the neck down while she repeats the word “nunchuck… nunchuck… nunchuck…”. there is a part where they argue about how to pronounce van gogh and then sing the tomayto tomahto song in unison and then announce “we are so cute”. the entire last half of the movie is the main couple kind of ineffectively flirt-fighting and then taking multiple breaks for the purpose of changing outfits, gimmick weapons and ambient 80s pop songs, before going back to chasing each other around the big house. sort of like the evil version of a david decoteau movie called 1313 Cougar Temple or something.
i feel like this movie is maybe too all-purpose adolescent in mindset to give any pertinent info to anyone trying to scry it for revealing psychic tendencies of the mnuchin set. at one point the main character is talking about killing people to save money for the california taxpayer versus keeping them incarcerated, and as she identifies the crimes of the many corpses she keeps in her garage as things like “ms-13… rapist… racist… al queda… republican (sassy wink)… democrat… independent… left her dog in a hot car”, and then turns to the camera again to give a spiel about not leaving dogs in hot cars. maybe we do get some glimpse of whatever inner dynamics these people have with one another when the final love declaration comes in the form of the line “I won’t tell anyone what you did if you don’t tell anyone what I did”. also: although linton changes outfits every few minutes onscreen, and i’m sure they are actually as expensive as her character claims, i gotta deduct marks in that none of them are actually good or all that visually interesting, all of them just registering as the kind of thing that would only read as stylish within the lowered expectations of a diplomatic function or something. something kind of depressing about the interchangeable drabness of all the real-life expensive signifiers on display.
anyway. at the end they have a very weird makeout session where she appears to be kissing his philtrum and then there’s a credits montage in which they get a puppy and then appear to have the same baby 3 times (it shows them holding a baby, and then cuts to a toddler, and then cuts back to the same baby, and then shows two toddlers… also the puppy is still a puppy during all this. cinema sins). as a sign of the character’s new maturity, she also announces “it’s not good to judge other people on their looks, beliefs, political positions or lifestyles”. in conclusion this is an extremely crazed film and anyone interested in the accidental grotesquerie that can result from throwing lots of money around would probably have a better time with it than with the snyder cut or whatever. source: it is 98 minutes long.
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Remember Me (2010) - my friend recommended this one but only on the caveat that I didn’t look up any details about the plot before watching. Technically it’s a “romantic drama” rather than a comedy, although what that seems to mean is it has the tone of 2004’s “Crash” remade inside a David Cage game editor - lotsa weirdly affectless depictions of “everyday life” in the modern urban landscape that seem to be entirely derived from other movies, punctuated by random swerves into extreme melodrama, like the director is invisibly choosing the most crazed dialogue option every time. Our first hint of this comes with the prologue set in 1991, where a lady gets mugged by two guys who then step onboard a train… wait for the doors to close, as she’s still standing on the platform… then they open the doors, shoot her dead without leaving the train, close the doors again and ride away. I guess it’s set inside the Death Wish universe.
We skip forwards 10 years and the murder doesn’t really come up again but is instead relegated to tragic backstory for one of the characters (the one with the weave) to help her relate to dishevelled badboy Robert Pattinson, also her cop dad once beat him up, this actually the major plotpoint of the film since every character assumes that “entering into a longterm romantic relationship with the daughter of a cop who broke your nose, for Revenge” is immediately intellible as motivation even when it’s not actually the case. Also they move in together since the first time she stays out late she gets in a verbal spat with the dad who immediately escalates proceedings by punching her in the head. After that it focuses more on Pattinson’s family, there’s Pierce Brosnan as an aloof wallstreet dad, there’s a Gifted Child little sister character who Pattinson protects at one point by terrifying an 11 year old girl in the middle of class (shoving her desk around, screaming, breaking a window).
If I try to remember what happens otherwise it’s just endless establishing shots of characters looking happily or sadly out of windows as music plays, to demonstrate Young Love. But looking out windows turns out to be another of the movie’s themes alongside abrupt violence. 20 minutes from the end I was thinking, wait, haven’t they wrapped up all the plot threads? How is there still film left? Also why is there so much emphasis on characters travelling from place to place on errands? Unless… no… NO… Yes, that’s right. Robert Pattinson looks ruminatively out the window of his dad’s office as he waits for the rest of his family to get there, and the camera zooms out to reveal he’s in the World Trade Centre on 9/11. He fucking dies!! And we also see a disaster montage of people weeping, becoming better people in a time of crisis, the abusive asshole cop turns out to be a Hero Cop (makes ya think!!). The loveable moppet little sister is fortunately too small to invade Afghanistan yet.
A funny thing is that since the movie takes place in 2001 they must have been expecting people to make the connection so they throw in the red herring earlier of having a college professor mention the “recent rise of terrorism”, to make you think it’s maybe already happened by this point. I did think people were being very calm if that was the case. There are probably numerous realworld examples to be referring to at that time but it’s funnier to me to read it just as unexplained foreshadowing in the vein of that one Biggie lyric about blowing up like the world trade. IDK apologies if this is glib but it really does feel like such a bizarre left turn in context that all I could think about was if every other 2000s romcom ended the same way… Bridget Jones smiles and monologues and then it pans out the window to reveal… Well, I am pretty sure I will Remember This.
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This rules
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While You Were Sleeping (1995) - named by questionable metrics as the most popular romcom within both Vermont and Delaware on some listicle graphic, all it took was the word “coma” in the IMDB description to make me want to check it out. It is set during Christmas in Chicago, which we know in part because a song plays in the opening scenes with prominent lyrics going “it’s Christmas in Chicago”, and Sandra Bullock plays a train station ticket lady who has a crush on a recurring commuter. One day he gets hassled on the platform by some Street Toughs who appear to take umbrage at his fancy coat (probably yelling “nice coat, coat boy”, things of that nature) and who accidentally push him onto the train tracks where he falls into a COMA. S. Bullock saves his life and follows him to the hospital where multiple misunderstandings lead to her being introduced to his family as the comatose man’s fiancee. Also, she can’t correct the assumption because his aunt has a bad heart and starts hyperventilating whenever anyone says anything dramatic!! Aunt May disease!!
From there the heroine at first reluctantly and then enthusiastically gets absorbed into the family life. It’s kind of funny since they’re not, like, flamboyantly loveable or anything, they’re just kind of unobjectionable. Although the dad is Peter Boyle aka the monster from Young Frankenstein, a definite get. A friend of the family has suspicions as expressed through a scene where he takes her onto the porch to tell her “I would never let anyone hurt them” (her response: “me either”) but the brunt of the investigation into her probity falls on the brother played by Bill Pullman, who slowly learns to etc etc. I believe he is like the 3rd or 4th romantic comedy love interest I’ve seen so far who has a sideline hand-crafting artistic wooden furniture. But could it end up as something more?? Meanwhile a funny thing about the protagonist’s ongoing weird deception is that she ends up having, not one, but TWO kindly fatherlike authority figures tell her to keep it up when her resolve begins to shake. Really thought that they’d go three for three and also have a scene where a dying child makes her promise to keep lying as his final wish but I guess they just decided not to push it.
Another weird set of screenwriting decisions have to do with the coma victim, who gets speed-characterised once he wakes up as kind of a sleaze who everyone is mad at. It felt like some kind of compensatory measure so we wouldn’t feel bad for him, and I wasn’t sure why it was being deployed - he’s unconscious of everything the other characters have been getting up to! he has no dogs in this game - but then I remembered, oh yeah there was that thing where everyone insisted that he had brain damage because he couldn’t remember his fake fiancee when he woke up. Oops!! Also a minor plot point in the movie is that he only has one testicle due to a violent basketball accident so maybe there was some residual screenwriter’s guilt.
Anyway after an entire movie’s worth of trying not to kill the aunt with dramatic exposition the main character eventually gives up and reveals all in the middle of her wedding ceremony to the coma guy. She goes back to working at the train station, but what’s this? Instead of some coins being pushed through the little ticket slot - - it’s a diamond ring!! Really believe the rest of the film was written backwards from this image, just like the cruise ship hitting the village in Speed 2. It’s also one of those movies where the last line is the name of the title - it’s her reply to the coma guy asking just when she fell in love with his brother and perhaps reads as needlessly ominous with that new context. After getting married and starting his homebrew furniture company Bill Pullman would go on to become president of the united states the following year, before settling down for a quiet life as a jazz musician the year after that.
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hey, i’ve seen that sequel! 
AWOOOOOO… 
well, it’s been a while since i wrote up any of these. but for halloween this year i thought it’d be interesting to try checking out some Lifetime original movies, on the basis that while they’re not romcoms per se they’re sort of like the Treehouse Of Horror version of the same format - the same setting and texture but infused with a new creepiness. suddenly all those chance encounters the format had relied upon take on a paranoid and baleful aspect. is the handsome stranger sitting next to me on the flight a secret member of ms-13? are the other moms in my daughter’s dance class conspiring against me? haven’t i seen that face before?
with that in mind here are some thoughts on the Stalked By My Doctor series starring eric roberts as the doctor.
Stalked By My Doctor (2015) - this sets up the basic structure for the first two movies: a teenage girl has her life saved by a handsome and much older doctor, who as it happens we’ve just seen striking out with a woman his own age / who was conscious and coping poorly afterwards (driving at 115mph down the road screaming “I AM A DOCTOR!!! I AM A DOCTOR!!!”, punching some boxes around, in one memorable sequence jumping up and down on a child’s doll like a 1930s cartoon character). as the girl regains consciousness, he starts to stare soulfully into her eyes…
imo this is quite a weird premise in that it’s less drawing upon conventional medical phobias than on old medical-flavour romances like Magnificent Obsession or something (ladies, is it a red flag when someone blinds you in a car accident?). i think a big part of how eg hallmark movies avoid being TOO creepy is by always assuring us that the heroine has an out, never making the stakes too high that she seems railroaded into something. so you can kind of see how the old medical romance motifs could be used to undermine that, but it’s still kind of funny to me that part of the anxiety these movies play upon is “what if a total stranger saved my life??”
however if you are interested in weird paranoid facebook chain letter critiques of the institution of medicine the movie has you covered as well. not only can an evil yet award-winning cardiologist amend coroner’s reports and secretly poison people through their prescriptions with impunity, he can also just walk into the room when someone’s in the hospital for a totally non-heart-related ailment to eg steal their phone and secretly send rude texts with it (the lifetime channel blurs out the word “tits” but only after the first two letters have been typed). there are also multiple shots of him just roaming the hospital while the kind of grimy guitar music they used to put on the credits of silent hill games plays. perhaps the grossest part is when he demands to change her bandages again, and there’s a closeup of him putting lube on his fingers and then he starts to sensually massage her car accident wound. the lifetime channel presents “crash”.
in general the more conventional stalker movie stuff would be depressing if not for the chaotic ineptitude and exuberance with which it is performed - jumping bugeyed into a closet because the family came back while he was rolling around fully clothed and alone in the daughter’s duvet. the question of whether or not the guy might be a weirdo is pretty much wrapped up for everyone in the narrative by the 60 minute mark. he kidnaps the girl, fakes her death, her mom and boyfriend make a desultory attempt to solve the mystery and then - - they give up!! (should have checked the big human-sized crate at the foot of the bed! rookie mistake!). at this point there’s kind of a fun swerve into more of an action movie thing. relations will not help you, only trust your fists. until now a nonentity the girl suddenly starts screaming wonderfully movie-climax lines back and forth with the doctor (“YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT LOVE IS!!” “I REACHED RIGHT IN AND STARTED YOUR HEART AND I CAN END IT THE SAME WAY!!”), he starts getting ready to cut her limbs off, she wiggles free and gets to whack him in the head with a golf club three or four times before stealing his car and heading back home to gatecrash her own funeral. a last funny touch is that during the “return from the dead” scene all the background extras are smiling and clapping like they just witnessed a successful romcom proposal.
meanwhile police break into the house but no-one’s there. cut to the shadowy land of, “mexico”… we see a familiar figure lounging in a restaurant… he is waiting for a girl he met… online!!! watch your ass!
finally, no discussion of this movie would be complete without mentioning surprise MVP “the boyfriend”. not only does his gf need heart surgery after he gets into a car accident by slowly texting while driving (“Hi Sam Yes I Would Love To–”), there’s also a delightful scene afterwards where he complains to her that “i’ll never run at full speed again” and then angrily throws a soccer ball, knocking over all his soccer trophies. despite this he is played as mostly sympathetic, although his gf’s dad does throw his phone in a basket of medical waste. but his most important function in the movie is to prompt one of the most compelling “fake offscreen videogame” sequences i’ve seen in a while - clutching a ps2 controller and grimacing while loud, wooden pinball table clonking sfx play, punctuated by random screaming sounds and bursts of machinegun fire. as drive-by media criticism goes i have to admit this is pretty much on point.
Stalked By My Doctor: The Return (2016) picks up where the last one left off - eric roberts is in mexico, hiding from the fbi and unsuccessfully trying to pick up women by showing them pictures of his boat. but then one day at a beach he saves the life of a teenage drowning victim by performing perhaps the world’s least convincing CPR (medical tip learned from this movie: pushing down on someone’s chest doesn’t work unless you also yell “HUH! HUH! HUH!” like a street fighter character every time you do it). their eyes meet… and before you know it he is re-entering the US with a fake passport in order to creepily watch her on her pre-med college campus.
at this point there’s a wonderful fake out: firstly a paranoid dream sequence about being intercepted at border security, which ends on a first person shot of the border agent screaming directly into the camera about what a boneheaded mistake that was, very failure-state-in-an-FMV-game aesthetic. and then of course in the real world he passes through without incident. next, we see him peering at the girl and her boyfriend from his car… suddenly the boyfriend starts giving him an intense look. the boyfriend runs over and pulls him out of the car - he starts yelling “i’ve seen you watching her! are you one of those perverts?!” and then immediately punches the doctor in the stomach. at this point we are expecting it to be another feverish paranoid fake out, but it turns out - it’s not! just a feverish paranoid movie. fortunately the girl recognizes him too, says what a crazy coincidence, this is the doctor who saved my life, and is weirdly unperturbed when he says he just wanted to pay her a visit and then pulls a customised lifejacket with her name on it out of the car. they all go for coffee together and she starts talking about her lonely, ill, neurotic single mom, and how much she could use a boyfriend who may also perhaps be a rich doctor why not.
anyway he hatches a scheme to date and kill the mom to get close to the daughter and in case you were wondering if this was just lifetime network version of “lolita” let me inform you there’s another part where he reads a big book that just has NABOKOV written on the cover while hornily reciting a quote from that novel. red flag right there. i’m not strictly sure if the plot makes sense given the daughter in this case is a legally autonomous college student but let’s not get too fussy. one advantage it does have over the source material: a wonderful subplot where he takes a blood sample from the daughter in order to fake results that she has genital herpes, in order to get her to split up with her boyfriend. he also posts this information online, resulting in the following exchange:
other activities include making some pancakes that spell out the word AMY and giving her inappropriate lectures about oxytocin (“we call it the ‘cuddle hormone’”). she is alarmed enough by this to try enlisting the help of her uncle, who has long hair and listens to rock music - unfortunately these are also pretty reliable tells that he’s about to be killed. that sequence is one of the more memorable in the movie as the uncle is watching, like, one of those old-timey movies on tv during a scene where it just happens to parallel what’s happening in the world outside. only in this case the back and forth is so weirdly drawn out and involved that it becomes more and more distracting and eventually kind of preempts the “real movie” that it parallels. anyway rip to the uncle: he looked like billy ray cyrus in that one photo and had an album of guitar rock called “roadtunes”. he will be missed.
anyway eventually the doctor gets married and heads off to ironically murder his acrophobic wife by pushing her off a building. there’s a good bit where the daughter is trying to get the police on his case by telling them about the incriminating stuff she found after breaking into his house. the operator says “you… do realise that breaking and entering is a felony” and the daughter screams “YOU PEOPLE ARE IMPOSSIBLE” and hangs up the phone. in the end mother and daughter band together to smash a bottle of champagne across the doctor’s head (how many head injuries does it take before someone is legally unable to practice medicine?) and hand him over to the police. case closed…or is it…?
Stalked By My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge (2017) - well, as it happens eric roberts has escaped justice by means of sexily winking at one of the jurors at his murder trial and is now set to move on to a new career which will hopefully give him less opportunity to predate upon young people, that of a college professor. meanwhile the returning victim from the first movie, who has since upskilled into dressing like lydia lunch, vows revenge. what happens next could be described as a meditation on “cancel culture” even more sweatily paranoid and unintelligible than most takes on the subject which is saying something.
for one thing dr beck has finally made the hannibal lector type leap into just being the protagonist now, complete with inner monologue represented by arguing with a version of himself who wears a hawaiian shirt. also from his pov is what seems like a marked increase in the amount of bizarre sexual fantasy sequences, where his college students abruptly pull open their tops while erotically chewing on pencils or the goth lady tearfully says that she was wrong and wants to have a threesome with him. the most elaborate of these was easily the full on old hollywood choreographed song and dance sequence that roberts and his love interest (more on which later) engage in on a hillside at night - my wife pointed out that this movie was the year after la la land.
meanwhile in the movie’s real world he is busy trying not to get cancelled from his university position by the mean goth lady who keeps pointing out that he tried to murder her. this part is pretty funny since we already know she’s right - it’s the same actress and everything - but it still kind of plays things as if she’s the badguy, as we see her skulking around at night to hide pornography inside the doctor’s lesson plans or paying guys with sleeveless denim jackets to give him a pretty desultory roughing up. eventually they hit an impasse - she successfully gets him fired by means of a petition (which the dean of the college mentions in hushed tones), while he gets her kicked out of the school by framing her for a fentanyl addiction. but the most delirious escalation comes when she ambushes him at home, ties him up outside, and starts trying to castrate him with a pair of scissors. so props to the filmmakers for both recognizing and following through on the extent to which the “university cancellation gone wild” discourse was an expression of weird sublimated sex fantasies.
anyway she doesn’t get to go through with it because a different college student chases her off, this one is the love interest, a medical student in the doctor’s class who tells him all the other guys in class are too immature for her (“you could say i’m allergic to guys” - his response: “i hope it’s not contagious”) and that she’s always had a thing for older man. so they get together, after aforementioned musical sequence, and in short order she’s telling him they have no choice but to track down and murder the goth girl together. buying a gun, they creep up on her car - the college girl fires through the window and then runs away to keep shooting at the car until it explodes in a ball of cgi flames. mission accomplished!! except when the cops come to talk to the doctor about all this, she ties herself to the bed and acts as though she’s been held captive the last few weeks. “if i didn’t obey him he was going to cut my boobs off or something”, she tearfully explains to the cops. meanwhile the doctor manages to escape.
in addition to being made after la la land, this movie was also made after gone girl. the doctor tails the college student to see what’s been going on, and finds she’s been in cahoots with the goth girl all along and is now giving her a makeover so that the latter can start a new life after having faked her death. the absolute most charitable reading i can give for the makeover look here is “stolen greek valour”.
also the car explosion was set up by means of, quote, “we researched the internet and learned how to make a bomb”. the doctor attacks them both with plans to exorcise their evil by performing a double heart transplant - putting the heart of each girl in the other’s body - not sure how this was to have worked exactly. they successfully fight him off by means of a tom & jerry esque frying pan to the head and then repeatedly bludgeoning him with an unloaded shotgun. head trauma count: unknowable by this point. as always however he escapes at the last minute and leaves both girls to the cold intentions of the law.
he will return in two more movies, one of which (Stalked By My Doctor: Sleepwalker’s Nightmare) is actually a crossover with a different lifetime movie about a lady who has sexsomnia (sleepwalking but for sex). however i will leave it off for now as this first trilogy culminates the vision of original auteur doug campbell, writer and director of all three movies. keep an eye out for “psycho swim instructor”, now filming somewhere.
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jesus
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As Luck Would Have It (2021) - had to watch this since it’s a hallmark movie set in ireland. standard amerikan-business-lady-seduced-by-country-chunk setup. particularities include:
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at one point they go to see her grandmother’s childhood home, now one of the ruins at the 6th century monastery at glendalough, for comparison i feel like this is like you showed someone visiting their grandparents house in america and it turned out to be located inside the statue of liberty
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for a hallmark movie it’s surprisingly boozy in a very 1950s way, everyone’s just ambiently pounding back both whiskey and guinness in half the scenes and since the love interest’s obligatory manly-yet-sensitive-and-potentially-commercial hobby is brewing whiskey there’s also a tasting scene where she swallows four neat shots in as many minutes to no visible effect. the romantic picnic scene has them bringing a bottle but no food.
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it’s set at a matchmaking festival but weirdly there’s no actual matchmaking, there’s an authentically irish in the looks-like-mr-tayto sense “official matchmaker” who goes around twinkling at people but there’s little further action on that front. instead it mostly revolves around a crumbling local castle and the effort of the main guy to guard the castle against enroaching american investors. at certain points he gets to gaze wistfully off into the distance while the protagonist says things like “there’s more to life than protecting the castle!”. also, the backstory to the castle is that it was always owned exclusively by descendants of an ancient irish king, thus making it potentially the only non-protestant castle in the country.
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it’s with sadness i must report the movie’s anti-mulch sentiment. the main lady gets a comic relief suitor who sits next to her on the bus and is a british guy who loves talking about mulch. he starts explaining the different types of mulch to her while she does her best to flee in every other scene, and he also tells people to go to “mulch dot co dot uk” which turns out to be a real gardening supplies website no doubt baffled by their abrupt uptick in traffic. i think this is a respectable obsession and have no patience with the remaining cast acting as though they’re better than mulch, in ireland no less. without mulch you got nothing!
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the main lady works for a hotel company looking to tear down the castle and eventually comes up with a new-old synthesis which would allow them to keep it intact while also building hotel shit around it, to be revealed to her boss at the big party. and… it doesn’t take! slightly unusually for this kind of film. she has to end up quitting her job and getting a job at an NGO instead to be able to preserve the castle. the big split point with the love interest in the film also comes at the big party, where she gifts him a small business proposal document she filed on his behalf for his homebrew whiskey enterprise and he essentially goes thanks i guess. but when we see him again later he has gratefully converted to the cause of monetising his hobbies.
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much of the film takes place at The Most Photoshopped Little Pub In The Country
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I had worked up to
This is out of nowhere, but this reminds me of my idea for a television show where the president is a serial killer but he only kills other, bad, heads of state.
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