possible spiritual follow up to “Snowmance”
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the line between wain/showalter rom com parodies and actual rom coms is growing perilously thin…
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excited for this… also i know its not really the thread for it but i found out today that the author of the bridget jones books wrote a 2003 spy novel about a bridgetjonesalike foiling the terrorist schemes of al qaeda that i’m sort of talking myself into needing to check out
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h-…have you read the full summary??? story spoilers blurred…
Feramo admits he is a muslim but tells Olivia he didn’t bug her. He invites her scuba diving in Honduras.
“admits he is a muslim” holy shit
Feramo chases her, but Morton arrives, punches Feramo and rescues her. Feramo is then eaten by a shark.
im fucking dying, im dying
She realises the Oscar statues are bombs and races to save the ceremony.
jesus
this is the most post-9/11 thing i’ve ever seen
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You got that right sister
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i’ve read it but don’t want to spoil it for anybody… i am reading an EBOOK and already at least one sentence has made me say “oh my god” aloud. i will report soon…
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A ROMM COMM TUUM SPECIAL PRESENTATION
after finding out about it yesterday i read the entirely of Olivia Joules And The Overactive Imagination (2003), the post-9/11 spy thriller from the author of the Bridget Jones books, in one sitting. though not strictly a romcom (or is it??) i post the results here in the name of supplementary research. come with me on a sweaty psychosexual trip into the early 2000s, a time period which, as we know now, never ended. content warning for c2003 cultural depictions.
first off i gotta say: the above sentence is not intended as a loose or vibes-based comparison. the heroine actually spends the first few chapters of the book wondering whether this chiselled and sexy movie producer / facecream expert who she wants to bone is, quite literally, Osama bin Laden wearing some kind of elaborate disguise. she goes on and on at the resemblance and confesses to an odd kind of disappointment when the real bin Laden turns up somewhere else at the same time, ruling the possibility out. even so it opens up an unexpected level of erotic frisson:
You’re having an overimaginative attack, she told herself. And it’s certifiably non-PC. Just because someone has dark hair, an accent and reminds you of Osama bin Laden, that’s no reason to decide he’s a terrorist.
She took a hot bath and fell into a fitful sleep, then awoke suddenly half an hour later hearing Ferramo’s voice again in her head, analyzing the accent. It was hopeless trying to sleep with jet lag. She changed position, moved her head this way and that, her thoughts becoming crazier and crazier.
so when this mysterious foreigner with an untraceable accent tells her not to turn up on a yacht the next morning, and it blows up in an al qaeda attack, she knows what she must do: follow him on a jetsetting tour of posh holiday resorts to find our if he’s secretly Muslim.
“Olivia, Osama bin Laden is a Muslim. Do you know what a Muslim is?”
“Of course I know what a Muslim is,” Olivia hissed. “What I’m saying is that maybe this is a new form of hideout. They’re very clever—they’re constantly changing tactics. Maybe drinking and womanizing on the Miami South Shore makes a better hideout than a cave in Tora Bora.”
there’s kind of an odd thing going on in the writing where it’s doing the very british humour columnist thing of being comically thickheaded and racist in a semi facetious way where you’re not meant to take it quite seriously. but the thing is, both her initial accent-based vibes read and everything else she says here turn out to basically be correct in the novel! not the Osama thing alas although it would be funny. it’s not the only odd thing going on in the writing as a lot of the word choices sort of reminded me of the kind of listicle noun avoidance that will have an article about oranges begin “these citrus spheres”. the below three fragments appear in quick succession in a paragraph about a hotel clerk letting her into her room
The charmingly shaggable, white-clad whippersnapper
ignoring the nosy young whippersnapper’s rudely interrogatory manner.
the delightful little white-clad bottom
you can tell when the author feels most firmly on safe ground as the parts about hyperspecific media jobs can actually be pretty funny:
She had to do something, otherwise she’d be back in London writing articles that began, “Suddenly there is more wallpaper everywhere!!”
i also liked the fake movies that get invented in a late detour into hollywood:
A Tim Burton movie called Jack Tar Bush Land about mini-humans whose bodies are on top of their heads and who live underground in woodland areas.
East Meets West, a comedy-drama with a message, featuring Anthony Hopkins as Chairman Mao, who, through an ancient curse, switches bodies with a young Los Angeles student during the Cultural Revolution.
Kevin Costner’s comeback playing a man having a midlife crisis who, over a period of three and a half hours, lumbers towards the realization that he actually really loves his wife.
alas, the plot has to continue. there’s a terrifying moment where not-Osama lets the mask slip:
Olivia watched as he looked at the document and rose to his feet, heading back to the wannabes. “Actually, we should be through by four.” He handed back the paper. “Shukran. And then we can reconvene to discuss the call-backs.”
Shukran. Olivia looked down, trying not to betray any reaction. Shukran was Arabic for “thank you.”
on an exciting helicopter date later, she sneaks into his room and discovers some prayer mats and miscellaneous “arabic writing”, and the truth come out. immediately after confessing to being secretly Muslim he begins talking like “Consider the needs of the Bedouin in the harsh and unforgiving desert lands" and “It was the fault of that accursed boat. Western technology, for all its promise, is designed to make a fool of the Arab.” making up for lost time i guess.
anyway, that’s the first and most enjoyable part of the book if you believe it. after that there’s kind of a rambling and directionless travelogue section. she meets backpackers and also gets framed for drug smuggling (didn’t this happen to bridget jones?). there’s a terrifying moment when she realises the honduran resort she follows him to sits atop a network of caves and tunnels - well, the associations are obvious. there’s an endless chain of side characters, henchmen, being carried here and there by hirsute guys named Alfonso. there are thoughts like the below while scuba diving through a cave:
What if Rod was one of Feramo’s men too and was going to kill her or lead her to Alfonso, who would perform female circumcision on her? What if she got trapped by an octopus?
and also kind of a gay panic moment with Fermano’s sexy lady companion who picks her up in a limo and squeezes her thighs. this prompts a fantasy about being tied naked back to back while he threatens them each with a whip. the lady companion turns out to be a member of MI6, and also a member of al Qaeda, and is finally implied to be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. it’s a rich text as they say.
the book kind of loses steam in part because as soon as he’s officially designated Muslim, Fermano sort of gets downgraded from suave sexy guy to alternately hapless and menacing child-man. a new romantic interest is introduced in the form of a hunky CIA agent who smokes weed but doesn’t inhale. he catches her in her underwear when she’s spying on a compound after she has to remove her clothes due to some kind of unspecified slime. stuff happens. there are irish, identifiable by saying “to be sure” or “bejaysus” every other sentence:
“To be sure,” said Miss Ruthie. “Come in and sit yourself down. I’ll get you some breakfast.”
Olivia half-expected a leprechaun to hop out and offer to help with her case.
the british ability to exoticise places that are nearer to them than parts of their own country continues to impress me… incidentally for all the stuff about menacing secret arabs, the book’s representation of a global conspiracy of englishness is far more alarming to me. everywhere she goes the heroine meets fellow brits who recognize each other instantly and whose presence always comes as psychic relief:
After briefly explaining her problem, she was put through to a man whose crisp English voice made her almost tearful. It was like bumping into a British daddy, or a policeman after being chased by brigands.
i never want to read the words “british daddy” again in my life.
anyway stuff continues to happen, she flies home, is interrogated and then recruited by MI6, is given a range of terrifying secret items for one final brave tryst with Fermano in the Sudan. gets instantly captured and equally instantly escapes again - there’s a real sense of the author like, imagining that she’d somehow have developed an interest in action scenes by the time she needed to write one, and realising that this was not the case she decides to press on and get it over with. there’s an unnerving description of how she gradually escapes a bag over her head by chewing first a small hole, then using her teeth and tongue to gradually enlarge it until she can see out of it - a previously unrevealed, xenomorphish level of jaw control. she briefly sees Osama when wandering around in a cave and we get a window into the al Qaeda sense of humour:
“The code,” she said. “Come on, or you die.” It sounded silly when she said it.
“Two four six eight.” He could barely whisper.
“Two four six eight?” she said indignantly. “Isn’t that a bit obvious? Are both doors the same code?”
He shook his head and croaked, “Zero nine eleven.”
She rolled her eyes: Unbelievable.
yes, we have fun. there’s also a disquisition on arabs as sad resentful children which is too crazily racist for me to want to repost. eventually she gets rescued by CIA man who somewhat cursorily defeats Fermano with a single punch (who then equally cursorily gets eaten by a shark without anyone noticing). she has seen “an Oscar cut in half, hollow in the middle” in the cave which is what finally gives her the brainwave for what the terrorists are plotting: handing out oscars filled with C4!!! another reason she thinks they’d want to attack is, as she explains, because “the entertainment industry is primarily jewish-run” - phrasing which really helps give you a sense of how much of an editing pass was involved in the book. the day is saved with the help of tim burton giving an overlong speech.
in the end i will save final word on this for the blurb quoted at the end. if the task of fiction is to express the spirit of an era then i cannot express how well this one succeeded.
“If Bridget Jones shaped and named a certain kind of life in the 1990s, it looks as if Olivia Joules, Helen Fielding’s new heroine, may do the same for the new decade”
—The Times (London)
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Carrie Bauer
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idk why, but instead of finishing up the last part of a series of articles i am currently writing, i’ve gotten stuck watching The Intern, and this one really is a curious outlier among the many mid romcoms of the last decade.
Pondering what did it try to tell me:
Retirees can have boners?
Workaholic Lifestyle is a good decision, so go for it?
Riding your bike in the office IS cool, but not having half an hour to clean up a desk and saying
‘Hey Gang, please keep this desk clean, kay?’
is totally normal?
Still loved it, of course, but drunk driver just disappeared to never be seen again, that’s a … uh, questionable way how to touch upon this subject, just sayin’.
…well… guess i’ll punch a ticket to that train? 
so that seems to be a … well…received … hallmark-esque Netflix Top10 flick?
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“They’re utterly ridiculous and I love them. If you’ve had a hard day at work and you cannot sit through another serial killer documentary, then the best thing to do is stick on a crap Christmas film."
The…two genres?? serial killer documentaries and hallmock christmas movies???
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a lot of these are a (to me) very appealing combination of postmodern and lazy, I think the hallmark phenomenon is related to the way that network television is suddenly more fun/smart than HBO stuff some of the time again (if you compare abbott elementary and elsbeth against the new bene gesserit show it is pretty striking). everyone wants stuff that’s kind of bad.
Jeb Lund and David Roth’s podcast has been a favorite for several years (my media consumption is like a solid 30% “whatever David Roth is doing now”)
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this kind of stuff is the old trawling through a discount vhs or dvd bin at the store. like theres a lot of weird gems amongst a pile of cheap trash that get shown on lifetime and hallmark it feels like! stalked by my doctor totally changed my perspective on lifetime movies at least
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lifetime has a long running series of movies where vivica a fox appears in each installment to tell the main character that they’ve gotten involved with the wrong man/life coach/roommate/septic tank cleaner very dramatically. god bless
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Only ever imagining this as a Lost Highway type appearance
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If you are a desi who’s parents want you to get married because it’s well past the time they believe you should be married and try to do matchmaking and dating websites for you, I do not suggest you watch the Netflix movie “Wedding Season” with your parents, a movie about a desi who’s parents want her to get married because it’s well past the time they believe she should be married and try to do matchmaking and dating websites for her.
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Rumor Has It… (2005) - movie about the rumor that there was a real family that the movie The Graduate was based on. just to be clear this is not about the movie The Graduate, this is about the human The Graduate that the toy Buzz Lightyear is based on. jennifer aniston stars as a character who has motivations and qualities which is always weird to me bc not to be mean but i always think of her as like a human metal gear solid stealth suit who has to move around a lot before your brain can perceive there’s anyone there. i have a hard time watching her since i keep saying “huh?! must be my imagination…” and going back on patrol.
anyway here she is playing the daughter and grandaughter of the ladies from the real graduate (distinct from the hanna barbara graduate). instead of running away with dustin hoffman at the end, her mom married a different guy and now our heroine is wondering which of them is actually her dad. she tracks the hoffman character down and he’s now played by kevin costner - more than that, since it’s a 1990s period piece to make the timelines fit up, he’s also a guru for an exciting new thing called “the internet” who we meet giving a conference speech at a trendy san fran party where people are saying things like “we just secured the domain name lobster dot com”.
people from california would probably know this more than me but i got the impression it was trying to make some point abt like, the sedate early 60s country club bits of california (someplace called “pasadena” which i assume does not really exist) and the exciting contemporary parts like san francisco, where you can do things like attend a conference on the internet, eat at a chinese restaurant, uh, ride a… private plane? get rides in someone’s painstakingly restored vintage roadster as he takes you to his vineyard? as this suggests the distinctions are often not as sharp as the movie seems to think, which makes it funnier how the aniston character INSTANTLY decides she resonates so much more with this flavour of fussy cali rich shit than her native kind and this must mean that he’s really her dad. after she announces her suspicion he lets her know that he medically can’t have kids bc someone kicked him in the balls really hard during a soccer match. anyway, that all cleared up they have sex instead.
okay… in fairness. the movie does weight the odds so as to try to make this all less skeevy. it’s clearly trying to present this all as a fun twist on the original movie and to take the “possibly my dad??” thing off the table. the aniston character is kind of unhinged for different reasons and we’re meant to read it in that context, etc. the funny thing is that they sort of whitewash it so much that the incesty associations if anything seem more notable by their absence. in the big ending speech where mark ruffalo as the starter fiancee takes her back, he talks the whole time like she just went through like regular wedding jitters or infidelity and does not address the uh psychosexual elephant in the room (worst kind of elephant). honestly i mostly just found it creepy in a “rob reiner really thinks this guy must be so cool” kind of way. although when she wakes up in costner’s bedroom the next day the first thing she discovers is a framed photograph of him hanging out with bill clinton, which probably seems more of a red flag now than it would at the time.
oh yeah i almost forgot the funniest part of the movie: she starts it engaged to the mark ruffalo character who is a lawyer and i was joking about how lawyers are always the discarded starter-pack boyfriends in these things. but by the end she ends up with him again!! how bad do you have to blow it in these things to end up with the lawyer!
finally i would like to say: they do introduce the costner character’s (in vitro) son at one point and i was very disappointed she did not fuck him, which would have probably completed some kind of dialectical greimas square arrangement. other solid possibilities would include the real dad sleeping with the fake one or mark ruffalo sleeping with shirley maclaine as the grandma. on one hand i sorta respect spending $70 million USD to tell a story with such little reverence for the nuclear family, on the other, why do it unless you’re willing to go all the way?
minor things i liked: aniston’s resident evil movie outfit when tracking down her not-dad, and her extremely large headshot on mark ruffalo’s desk.
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@Felix lives there
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