My wife has recently required that I play her in a constantly recurring Scrabble app game, so I’m glad this movie can give me the confidence that it will transport our romance to a higher plane
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your games with her are gonna be more like the doc spellbound
I don’t know what that means but if it has to do with tying people up I can assure you that it will not.
no its a scrabble documentary about really dysfunctional people its a classic
the way the people in the movie play scrabble is using each word to microblog their day like “DISCOURAGED… how i felt after todays big meeting :(” and “COMMUNICATION… sometimes its what you need the most :)” and i think if an actual couple were to talk this way for the length of a whole game their place would look like the cabin from evil dead 2 within 40 minutes
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those are some huge ass scrabble words for getting seven tiles in your hand wtf
i had to double check but at one point the male lead definitely spells SUPERNOVA unprompted with no connecting tiles. the little glimpse of the app suggests they get like 20 letters per turn…?? maybe they’re playing on a free build server
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Scrabble Reloaded
Well, it is with embarrassment and dismay that I must cop to a failure of due diligence: my review of 2007 christmas classic Holiday In Handcuffs, the one where Melissa Joan-Hart kidnaps Mario Lopez at gunpoint to be her fake holiday boyfriend, somehow neglected to mention that it was directed by Ron Underwood - the guy who did Tremors! And, uh, City Slickers, and… The Adventures Of Pluto Nash, following which all his work seems to have been on TV. But I say that not to mock. Certain forms of failure are more respectable than any success.
And so to pay late homage I decided to watch his 1994 studio romcom Speechless, starring Michael Keaton and Geena Davis as rival political speechwriters falling in love on the campaign trail. If that sounds familiar it’s because the whole film was plausibly-deniably-inspired by the then famous 1992 courtship of unpleasantly goblinesque Clinton lackey James Carville and his Bush counterpart Mary Matalin (whose more recent accomplishments include running a conservative publishing imprint for important contemporary voices like Don Trump and Milo Y). So, we are already in hell. But don’t forget that 90s romcoms loved to spice things up by making them a little bit “political” in this way, for example The Runaway Bride, where the premise is a wacky opposites-attract courtship between somebody who hates women and somebody who is a woman.
Unfortunately this one somehow came out sleepier and more anodyne than I could possibly have expected from the hellish plot. Even the familiar beats are kind of indifferently sold: there’s a part where the leads stumble into an empty room to have sex during a big speech by a senator, and it turns out to have a bunch of soundboard and monitoring equipment that they passionately fall down on… but instead of at least accidentally blasting sex noises over the PA, or something, old lady faints, senator looks scandalised etc, all that good stuff, they end up just somehow playing brief public domain video clips of like tarzan yelling and a wacky sumo match and stuff over the speech for a little while? They didn’t put in any clips of like a hay cart collapsing or a drunk guy rubbing his eyes and then looking at his bottle and throwing it away, to further stick it to the fat cats in Washington, maybe they thought it would just be too incendiary. The LA riots were still in recent memory at that point.
People leaving important equipment unattended is a running theme - at one point Michael Keaton sabotages a senator’s speech by writing song lyrics into a teleprompter, and at the end of the movie he takes over the sound system for the winning politico’s victory speech to instead do his big declaration of love. Actually maybe I should say that the running theme is specifically misuse of equipment to annoy senators. There should have been a tv cartoon about it. The other big running theme in the movie is close up shots of people’s feet, which I swear I’m not imagining bc I saw at least two people on letterboxd comment on it too… gotta give the moms what they want.
Other details: Christopher Reeves plays a love rival war journalist called Baghdad Bob, which dates this film to anytime in the last 30+ years, and the one time I laughed was when he introduces himself to someone with “call me Baggie”. Ernie Hudson plays a character with somehow no distinguishing traits or scenes whatsoever. Harry Shearer has a tiny part as one of the actors from a fake in-universe sitcom? I like Geena Davis but nobody here has anything to do!! Also not to be a scold but I feel like the filmmakers overestimate how quickly we can be charmed by a main character that’s introduced bitching about tax and spend. Anyway at the end it turns out that both the senators are corrupt to the exact same monetary amount and to the exact same sleazy hedgefund guy, and the two leads go off in disgust to form their own long shot mom n pop political campaign for some office in Long Island. The seasons turn. Winter becomes spring. Melissa Joan-Hart thinks about purchasing a gun. James Carville has not yet been gotten by a graboid.
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Irish Wish (2024) - well, it’s been a while but what better time to watch a new irish-themed one of these than st patrick’s weekend. i’m doing MY part. plus lindsay lohan has actually had a pretty good run of these. she was in a really crazed one i watched at my parents called “falling for christmas”, in which she’s a millionaire ski lodge heiress who falls off a cliff and gets AMNESIA and must be nursed back to health by a humble, blue collar, uh, ski lodge proprietor. and of course she was in the mcfly vehicle Just My Luck. so a strong track record of movies where she either gets a head injury or is cursed by a mysterious supernatural entity and i’m happy to say this one is the latter kind of thing.
firstly… i know nobody cares but i have to say the film’s most jarring quality to me: it was filmed in ireland but parts of it are meant to represent america, so there are early scenes taking place in “brooklyn” where people are getting in and out of yellow cabs intercut with stock footage of nyc - but also all the secondary characters have unremarked-upon irish accents, and the glamorous new york launch happens across the street from dublin’s premier communist bookstore
lindsay lohan’s mom also has an accent but is meant to represent a schoolteacher in des moines and whenever she appeared the thought of them like carefully constructing an american-style highschool set somewhere in dublin gave me a mild feeling of vertigo. anyway most of the movie after that takes place in more familiar countryside settings. the plot involves a roguish bestselling irish novellist (sample quoted line: “…and he disappeared into the mossy glen”) and his editor, lindsay lohan, who apparently also cowrote the book but was pressured to leave her own name off it. despite this she loves him enough to follow him to County Mayo, where she spends a few days glumly third-wheeling it up around his family’s ancestral castle(?). there’s a good bit where she heads out to a dock with her friends only to find there aren’t any romantic little pink rowboats left for her to use. oh, you guys go ahead. pay me no mind - i’ll be mournfully standing on the dock watching you all. is this what that otis redding song was about.
all the author’s family dress like members of Vampire Weekend but this really is how posh irish guys tend to dress so i’ll allow it. note the goofy little bloomsday hat… anyway soon after this the movie takes an unexpected supernatural twist as after dramatically exclaiming “i wish I was marrying Male Lead” suddenly a mysterious twinkling irish lady appears to her from behind a rock to say “is that a wish you were makin’”, make strange gestures and summon a burst of magic wind that isekais lindsay lohan into a new reality. it later turns out that this is actually St Brigid although she seems more like some kind of non-sectarian prankster bog fairy than a christian saint. throughout the movie she will be magically appearing in mirrors, airplane boarding screens and stained glass windows to do a sassy wink and indicate the presence of deviltry.
anyway once again its an irish romance movie the actual romantic lead turns out to be an english guy who was in fuckin Downton Abbey of all things! i believe this is a weird result of romcom dialectics: the fantasy is “ireland” but they don’t want to risk people thinking lindsay lohan is gonna be married off to some dirt eating peasant, so the irish families are always like rich castle owners - but that makes them TOO rich to function as love interests and so the actual romance is deferred to a safety brit. someone should tell the “how the irish became white” guy about this so he can write a sequel. anyway he has a job as a nature photographer which means he gets to deliver the line “i’ve just been offered a job to photograph that lizard!” as part of the big romantic denouement.
other notes:
- starts off with the dictionary definition of a “wish” onscreen before the title comes in in the lord of the rings font
- the lindsay lohan character’s favourite author is james joyce and she gushes that the cliffs of moher are “like something right out of his pages”. is she thinking of the dead guy from “the dead”?
- when st bridget undoes her parallel reality magic we get a quick best of all the scenes where lindsay lohan falls over something played in reverse
- i wish more of it too place in neo-dublin since the nyc greenscreens were kind of endearingly weird. also glad that dublin has grown enough to be a proxy for new york instead of its traditional role on film, “acting as standin for 19th century london in Fu Manchu movies”
- ten minutes into this one my wife said “this is going to be your Erasure” and i think she was right
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I have been waiting for this post since I first saw the trailer for this movie…
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The Idea Of You (2024) - what if you were the 40yo divorced mom of a teenage one direction fan and through a complicated chain of events you ended up in a loving sexual relationship with harry styles, or at least his non-likeness-infringing fictional equivalent? i can only imagine that the slow collapse of the motion picture industry has led to one of those last-days-of-rome type situations where three guys and a horse walk in and just seize the consul, except with fanfic moms deposing an ailing nora ephron dynastic line
anne hathaway plays the mom which is distracting throughout and the british kid from that uk prince x usa presidents kid movie i refused to watch on general principle is the pop star, who falls in love with her when she walks into his trailer at Coachella to take a pee and doesn’t know who he is. he sits outside the door until she’s done and then offers her a soda. this awkward exchange is enough for him to dedicate a song to her that night (“this one’s called ‘closer’” but not the NIN one) and also to show up at her art gallery the next day, buy all the paintings, and then go back to her house and help deal with the broken refrigerator by smelling all the food to tell if its gone bad (one direction smelled my yogurt??). they make out and he sends her a horny text bc he got her phone number off the store invoice. i love her expressions in the big romantic scene where he’s meant to be singing to her
i believe this movie takes place in the Gilmore Girls extended universe of mom fantasy; telltale signs include precocious teenage daughters who share their mom’s taste in fiona apple albums and whose favourite activity is giving responsible updates and life wisdom. a fun addition to it is the heel ex-husband, who talks like george clooney in burn after reading and who always shows up with his new gf that stands around making ambiguous expressions. after a certain point the gf tells the mom that she’s going to break up with him but he doesn’t know yet and then she disappears from the movie. why are you in here? why is this almost 2hrs long?? adding “harry styles takes YOUR side in the divorce” to the film’s wide and unusual list of sex fantasies
there is a surprising amount of sex given the main characters have no chemistry and spend the whole movie just kind of staring expressionlessly at each other like space aliens in human disguise. my favourite scene was when she brings him home to make him a sandwich - which is maybe less “romance” than “taking pity on your child’s weird friend” coded - and we get something like five or six cuts between their faces making this expression every time. if someone looked at me like this over a microsoft teams meeting i’d assume they were thinking abt beating me to death with my own work laptop.
it really pops off when she flies over to meet him in new york and takes off her coat to reveal she’s wearing what i would describe as Sexy Emily Dickinson Fit. and then right after they do it he orders some chicken fingers from room service, which i believe is also part of the fantasy
eventually she joins the european tour as his Art Consultant, there’s some drama with mean 20something girls who are implied to be following around one direction for low, slutty reasons rather than beautiful, romantic ones. there’s a scene where they pass a crowd of fans waving french flags and then a shot of the eiffel tower as the word PARIS floats over the screen and then they’re in a restaurant and he says “are you enjoying paris?” and she responds “…oui”. as this exchange suggests it’s pretty good in places. news of their relationship breaks surprisingly late in the movie but has some good headlines of things saying YOKO 2.0?? and shots of anne hathaway looking sad as she reads youtube comments calling her weird. as the token fat friend sagely remarks “people hate when women are happy.”
at the end he says that the only way for them to be together is for him to disappear for five years and come back when the heat dies down. in the next scene he does! and you can tell they’ve both grown bc he now has stubble while she is resplendent in a clintonesque pantsuit. as hilary sez, “what happened??”, presumably in the context of talking about this movie. but i enjoyed it. best wishes to the fanfic moms in their continued sweep over the eurasian plains.
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Recently my youtube recommendations have been giving me two things: korean tik-tok paced web dramas aimed at teenagers/young adults, and clips of Chinese/Taiwanese/Thai dramas that are always titled as “woman bullies Cinderella but is shocked to find she is CEO’s wife” (note: these are always different shows, the CEO is not always a CEO, and the “Cinderella” is never actually his wife).
The web dramas I’ve been looking at have predominantly been from a channel called CheezeFilm, and all of there shows have the same overall style. They’re 7-10 minute episodes. Often times these videos can be part of a series, but the videos often are not titled to indicate they are; they’re usually titled as if it is an individual video about one scenario (for example, the series called “Welcome to the Sandbox” consists of videos named things like “Two handsome males colleagues appeared”, “I turned up pretty to the man who ignored me”, “The rich man who drives Porsche hates me”, and “The men scolded the woman who bothered me”. The channel has 3 million subscribers and videos usually range from 500k views to 6+ million views.
These videos often have a rapid pace, with fast speech, quick cuts, and minimal downtime, much like tik tok/youtube shorts style editing, except stretched for 7 - 10 minutes. A good example is the beginning of the first episode of the series “My Sister”, titled “had a sister one day” which has 12 cuts in the first 10 seconds. This editing style typically used most heavily at the beginning of a video, as if to retain the viewer attention, and can lightly slow its pace later on (though it’s still faster than you typically see out of a regular tv show). Many of these series get a final, single video collecting all of the episodes into a single movie.
The english translations are good enough to get the general sense of what they’re saying but have grammatical errors often enough that you can’t complete trust them and still have to actively parse what the characters are likely saying. But the stories are built so heavily as retellings of genre cliches that it is easy to understand the intention. These stories are very much romance drama cliches packaged into easily digestible videos. They are also very aware of what they are, as this channel has been around for enough years that its character routinely break the fourth wall and will call out how a series is reusing story beats, actors are replaying character types and plot lines they did in another series, and acknowledge to the viewer that both they and you know this is junk food (cheeze?).
An interesting thing mentioned in one of the videos is that this brand does not cast actors for specific stories. Instead, it puts out auditions, hires actors, and then writes stories around the personalities of those actors. I’m thinking these stories also use the actors’ real names as their character names as well, as I’ve seen the same people turn up multiple times under the same character name, even following same character type as a previous role. I don’t know how this channel works as a company, but I can see this leading viewers to rally around specific personalities as part of the appeal. In the finale of the YouTube Shorts series titled “Galaxy Tab S8”, the two romantic leads are using a Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra to watch a previous CheezeFilm video they themselves starred in as romantic leads. The male lead notices that both people in the video look like them, and the female leads remarks they have the same names as them as well. They see themselves kiss in the video, which then spurs them on to kiss in “real life”. Cure credits, which montage stills from this 30 second YouTube Short and is still cut to loop itself like normal TikToks/YouTube shorts.
This might be a good time to mention that this relies heavily on the Truman Show school of product placement. Character will frequently pivot into monoglues espousing the virtues of a particular brand of make-up or food, and entire episode plotlines can be written to create a “natural” scenario where the characters would advertise a product to someone/the viewer. In the episode “Follow one’s boyfriend part-time” in the series “Tree Man”, the male and female lead are shown working at a part time job at the Korean beauty store Oliveyoung, giving the character an excuse to advertise Onion brand beauty products at least three times, each segment lasting around 30 minutes.
First when a female customer asks the male lead for a basic cream, second when the female lead interrupts and tries to sell a product to a different female customer because she’s cognizant of the fact that any woman who talk to the male lead falls in love with him*, and lastly when the episode randomly cuts to the female lead using the Onion brand creams as part of a make-up routine. In the series “Welcome to the Sandbox”, the characters are working at an advertising agency named Sandbox, giving it a “natural” excuse to have the characters discuss the merits of a product and to then later film an in-world ad.
In the episode “Two women who loved Tree Man” from the series “Tree Man”, the characters are taking the “Understanding the Galaxy Book” course at their university and their homework for the day is to prepare a presentation on the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro. The video linked above, from the series “Galaxy Tab S8”, is actually more of an ad with a small drama attached to it than a drama with product placement.
*(This phenomenon is remarked upon by a female character in the aforementioned series “My Sister”, where a female friend of the male lead explains to him that in dramas for women the show creates a rival for the male lead, while in dramas for men all women the male lead meets will fall in love with him. She then acquiesces to her fate and kisses him.)
Some of these shows can have a bit of shock value thrown in. The series “Hairy World” closely mimics the storytelling sensibilities of a generic harem romcom comic, with every episode ending with a new female character taking up resident inside the male lead’s home against his will. It does a surprisingly admirable job of conveying the dream logic of those kinds of series, where the female characters instantly adapt to having a new home after being given a place to sleep after a drunken night out and then torment the male lead any times he tries to force them out. In the finale titled “I have four new moms”, the four female leads declare the male lead has been too indecisive in choosing a partner, something the series had not been very much concerned with at all up to that point, much like a classic anime series that is mostly comprised of standalone episodes until it hits it’s two-part series finale on episodes 25 and 26. As the female characters say, the series has been running for four months and the channel’s subscribers have gotten tired of waiting for him to choose a love interest. The female leads decide the solution to chop the male lead up into multiple pieces so each woman can have him.
As the male lead gets chopped into pieces, he wakes up and realizes it was only a dream, although one of the women for some reason really did go to bed wearing iron knuckles, which she had used in the dream. The episode then proceeds into a storyline where a young girl shows up at their door, stating she is the daughter of a woman the male lead slept with when he was in university. They had broken up when the male lead did not trust his partner and thought she was cheating on him. His partner ended up losing her home, giving birth a child he did not know about, living a life of poverty, and dying from illness. The daugther returns to give money her mother had saved up, money the male lead thought she owed him, but really to tell him off for abandoning her mom. The episode ends with the male lead asking her to stay so they can live as a family. The four women who had invited themselves to live in his house are still there years later and the young girl has accepted them as her four moms.
CheezeFilm’s newest video at the time of this post is titled “A friends’ daughter” and seems to be potentially the beginning of a new series. A middle aged man finds a high school girl coming to live with him, the daughter of his best friend in Japan. She wanted to go to school in Korea and so her father arranged for her to live with the male lead. Romantic drama misunderstandings happen between the middle-aged male lead and the highschool girl, with him walking in on her changing, or her catching him holding her underwear while doing the laundry. She grows to distrust to him and asks him to not interact with her anymore, which he chooses to respect.
Later, he finds the young girl being harassed by a group of highschool boys who are sexually threatening her. The male lead initially tries to intervene, but when remembering the girl’s request for privacy, he decides to leave and go home. He later finds she was hit by the boys, and over the next few months he observes she is being more and more physically abused by those boys. The male lead finally decides to take action. He suits up in all black, find the three boys, beats them with a baton and taser, and slits their Achilles tendons so they can never walk again.
The story of the boys becomes a hot topic in Korea, but the public acknowledges the boys as bullies and believe they deserved it. The highschool girl seems to suspect the male lead did it, and he ultimately decides to turn himself in. However due to the public being on his side, he only gets three years in prison. When he returns home from prison, he finds the highschool girl is still living in his home. She hugs him, and also says she didn’t hug him because she likes him. She is now also 20 years old, having graduated highschool, but the episode ends with a new highschool girl knocking on his door- the daughter of a friend the male lead made in prison, whom the male lead had agreed could come live with him. Much to the previous girl’s annoyance.
And a jumpscare of a thumbnail for what actually appears to be a regular romance story about elementary school kids whose title maybe got twisted in translation.
So all of that established…
All I really wanted to say was that the final episode of their series “187cm 155cm Couple” was legitimately sweet. I was really taken aback. A classic “will they won’t they” about two highscool friends with a large height difference and a relationship built on teasing each other, this series has a comfortable and cozy atmosphere. The final episode, titled “High School Couples Skinship Moment”, could perhaps be b-roll of the couple that never got used in the series proper that were collected into single video. But it works so well as a send-off, a victory lap, and as just a vignette of a highschool couple’s relationship. A constant mix of teasing, flirting, friendship, and romance, the two actors have a really fantastic chemistry. At one point the male lead literally lifts the female lead up with a single arm and carries her away off screen.
The lighting of the shots, predominantly taken at golden hour and giving the characters a golden glow outline, plays up the dreamlike sentimentality of the short. It’s use of the main theme from the anime 'Saint Tail" is doing a lot of the lifting here as well. I had no idea the music in that show was so fantastic (which I’ve learned alternates between sweeping orchestras and Breath of Fire 3 field/dungeon music), and the theme works surprisingly well as a romantic theme. And then the final scene, as the music slows down to its most dramatic and sentimental, is shot of the two characters taking a walk, his arm around her shoulder, and the two take a moment to turn to the camera, flash a peace sign to the viewer without breaking their straight faces, and the turn their face back forward as they continue their walk. It’s as if the characters decide to take a moment to assure the viewers that they’re happy before the show signs off, and then they return to their own world.
Just good vibes all around.
I’m not going to proofread or edit any of that.
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thank you for posting about this!! i had no idea about this stuff but it makes me think of a direction i always wished the hallmark/lifetime stuff would explore, acknowledging and playing with their own materiality as fantasy objects built of reused props and actors and shots of the same mcmansion suburbs - accepting the weird directions this permutation quality might go into instead of trying to bury it for immersion. the closest they’ve come to that energy is the oddly tromalike development of the Stalked By My Doctor doctor crossing over with the “sexomnia” victim from “sleepwalking in suburbia”, i think
the plot of the harem anime household who dismember their love interest is also sort of the starting point for my favourite shintaro kago comic…?? “great minds”
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Chainsaw ending also feels like something Franken Fran would use to solve a problem.
There’s a definitely a balance that needs to be had. I’ve just been clicking around randomly on the channel so I’m not watching its videos in order, but I’ve run into a lot of videos that make use of these self-referential conversations. Seeing so much of it back-to-back ends up detracting from the stories and it starts to feel too much like papering overing narrative points you don’t want to write or develop.
this is amazing, thank you for sharing
One small musing I forgot to fit into the earlier post. I had mentioned how a lot of the videos are named with no indication that they’re part of an overarching series, and I wonder how much of that sentiment is also factored into the writing. I have a hunch that a lot of these episodes may be written with the recognition that people fall into watching random videos via the recommendation algorithm, so every video/episode to some degree is written to stand on its own as a small mini-drama.
I was watching the Korean romantic comedy Business Proposal today and was reminded that the in-your-face product placement from the youtube dramas may be learned behavior from television dramas, because this scene below is very much in line with the earlier examples of product placement. This series, based off the webtoon and web novel of the same name, is a real version of those Chinese/Taiwanese/Thai thumbnails I shared above, as this is about “Cinderella goes on blind date in place of her friend, finds CEO is her partner”. Very tropey and cheesy, but comfortably amusing romantic comedy.
But this also reminded me of the Korean romantic drama/comedy Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, which I watched last year, and has one of the most hilarious moments of product placement I’d ever seen. After long string of dramatic plotlines came this scene:
Show was pretty good, though it’s equal parts melodrama and comedy. Based on early 2000s movie, it’s about a big city dentist having to setup her dentistry in a small, close-knit rural seaside town. It has all the classic culture clashing between the urban/rural lead couple, but a large focus of the show is portraying the everyday lives of the people of a small town. Very cozy, but ramps the melodrama up and down keep you on your toes. I didn’t realize until after I finished it that it was by the director of my favorite K-drama Oh My Ghostess, which is about a young woman haunted by the ghost whose lingering regret is she died a virgin and it proceeds into a body swap/mistaken identity dramedy (highly recommended).
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its the netflix-commodification of dramas, and serves as a good tool for teaching audiences (that care a tiny bit) when and where you are putting filler content.
Hmmm is that a good coffee, i feel so refreshed now!
they are still doing it on the nose like this, even if you wouldn’t believe it…
colbert report did a great parody of this but you cant see it anymore because comedy central nuked all of that stuff the other day
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Oddly close to the acting and writing of the Dominos pizza scene.