So ripe for gags I’m thinking??
Roman Holiday
2 Likes
three quarters through this masterpeice at present moment, the musical cues are supberb
9 Likes
Audition and My Sassy Girl are added to the list! However since I’m using a random number generator to pick what I actually watch it’s essentially in god’s hands whether I check out them or, you know, a movie where Mandy Moore plays the president’s feisty daughter.
Chasing Liberty (2004) - I would rate this droopy dad fairly low in the big list of hollywood presidents although I did enjoy his Casual Friday look aboard air force one:
In terms of fake movie politics we do learn he likes passing out sanctions for kicks which I guess does tie in with my understanding of US geopolitik. There’s an inevitable moment when the daughter comes rushing in yelling while he’s meeting foreign dignitaries where we learn he’s trying “to persuade the EU to adopt our plan to give humanitarian aid and medical technology to developing nations” which is sounds just as awkward and halting as it reads but good job for trying. There’s a mild joke about the Clintons and a seemingly unrelated but distracting recurring one about cigar smoke in the oval office while the dad looks guilty.
They all go to Prague for the “G Summit” and the daughter sneaks out to attend a special guest concert appearance by The Roots(??), she yearns to be free and ditches her bodyguards by taking off with a British guy who talks like a dubbed movie character and has a continual expression of mild disgust. There’s a slightly extended chase scene where they’re trying to dodge the secret service and I always wonder who watches romantic comedies starring Mandy Moore for the car chases. Anyway it turns out the british guy is secret service too, he’s assigned to secretly accompany her as she wanders through Europe, as my girlfriend pointed out this is pre-Resident Evil 4 so nobody knew the risks involved. The rest of the story is basically as creepy as you’d expect when it’s a love story between a girl and the undercover police official ordered to spy on her. At the point when they finally have sex it’s AFTER he’s learned to be more emotionally open but BEFORE she actually knows that he’s a cop, which is fairly alarming.
Throughout the whole movie she dresses in disguise as one of the default character skins in Second Life.
At one point she falls in with some german “Gen-X’ers” (as listed in credits) and the camera lingers on their faces like we’re maybe supposed to recognize these freaks but I looked them up and don’t know why we would. They return later as “horny freaks” during a mildly distressing climax where MM gets surrounded at a Berlin love festival.
When she goes back to Harvard she complains that there are “all these courses but not one course on love”. She goes to England to live with the ex-SS agent and they flee her new bodyguards together and etc. But just before they do we get a shot of the new bodyguards and one of them sort of distractingly looks like G Gordon Liddy? The love interest is I guess working in a Puccini opera but the singer seemed to be dressed a little like Stalin and he watches over them as they kiss, I guess in line with the movie’s general theme of finding love through omnipresent paternal surveillance.
11 Likes
This is Cuba pranking you, but if you’d like to view this horror show through the lens of romcom that might be interesting
hahah well it’s on the list now so! maybe I can scopecreep my way to rewatching the francis ford coppola dracula movie again too.
3 Likes
long to see the threads between Chasing Liberty’s
and Audition’s initial dubiously sympathetic creep trying to find love through this own duplicitous screen tied
2 Likes
I mean the power of Audition is that its gross, creepy setup isn’t any worse than what you see in any number of straight romantic comedies that result in happy couples Finally Found That One
right?
2 Likes
Yeah, I always just viewed Audition as “oh hey actually romcoms can be really horrible and creepy” but then run through Miike.
2 Likes
Dammit gary you spoiled it
2 Likes
But yeah it’s an indictment of romcoms, Miikefied
This is exactly what booji just said but now I also said it
3 Likes
I lent Audition to a friend once apparently without telling him what it was and he genuinely thought it was a straight romcom. I think it fucked him up a lot more than most people for that reason.
3 Likes
Runaway Bride (1999) - I mean if you want horror films that sort of self-present as romantic comedies then jesus christ. dogwhistle bill-maher-lookin misogynist op-ed guy hears an inaccurate story about a “maneater” told to him by the maneater’s ex-bf in a bar, he publishes it in the national press, he gets fired because it’s, uh, an inaccurate story that was just reprinted without checking from some guy in a bar so in retaliation he decides to track down the woman in question and follow her around her small town looking for evidence to double-down on his public vilification. ostentatiously hangs out with her friends and family who think he seems like an OK guy and acquires videotapes, topless photos, anecdotes about the lady in question. While putting together a big whiteboard chart about how she doesn’t seem remorseful enough and plotting how to show her up for the benefit of another national expose. and this is one of the romantic leads!! I guess this was before youtube / reddit so if you wanted this kind of content you had to wait for some reporter to put boots on the ground and start hanging around like a Lifetime movie villain in person around a woman instead of compiling it retroactively from facebook feeds. Anyway if I start thinking about any of these movies from this angle I’ll get depressed so here is some funny stuff I noticed in this film.
-
when the guy is writing his column it suddenly changes to the most encarta-ass fussy piano writing music like he’s jessica fletcher from murder she wrote
-
at one point julia roberts looks at him and says “there he is again… snoop doggy dogg” in this unparseable cadence and i’m still not sure what this refers to.
-
the clerk in the hotel seems to be playing some kind of VR game?
-
there’s a long, mysterious shot of julia roberts standing wildeyed in front of an electric fan and slowly shuffling from side to side like a lizard in a dark souls game
-
also she sneaks into his room one night and wakes him up by standing at the foot of his bed and making seal bark noises
-
continuing the trend of showing somebody is a popular magazine writer by showing bluecollar workers in streets of NY staring at their papers and nodding appreciatively
-
i guess she falls in love with him because he’s secretly romantic and sensitive but in that case why the fuck is he writing these columns???
-
it tells you it’s a garry marshall film and then shows a highlight reel of nice moments from the film. and then it tells you it’s a garry marshall film again! so i guess it’s a flashback to the first time?
i guess this movie was in production for like a decade which explains why it absolutely does not feel like it’s from the same year as The Matrix. but also “i still havent found what i’m looking for” plays over the title and the dates confirm my belief that the entire movie was probably just written backwards as an excuse to use that song.
12 Likes
Because he’s “snooping” and “dogging” her.
Now if you’ll excuse me, because I could follow the writer’s thought process there, I have to go get the rapping monk to kick my ass.
5 Likes
My sister’s mother-in-law was Julia Roberts’ kids night nanny for a bit. When my first nephew was born, “Julia” let her borrow the private jet to get to the Bay Area and see her new grandkid fast.
this is what happens when the sort of person who has a private jet to casually loan to the help is given some slack to improv
7 Likes
recommending “modern romance” (1981) if you haven’t seen it! these write-ups are really great
2 Likes
omg please do Dracula, i love the weird romance in that
2 Likes
Citizen Dog
you have to add this one to your watchlist
its aesthetically great
5 Likes
LARRY CROWNE (2011) - originally intended to watch Eat Pray Love but it turns out that movie is two and a half hours long so switched to this instead. starring tom hanks and julia roberts, written by tom hanks and… oh shit, nia vardalos!!! who also cameos as the voice of “map genie”. as expected her then-husband is in here too along with cedric the entertainer, pam grier and bryan cranston, who plays julia robert’s husband as sort of a prototype version of those altright guys who hock dietary supplements, he’s shown boasting about building “a flamethrower of a posting for warriorweb” and logging “3 hours of bloggin talk for cybershare!” in between doing reps and looking at 1950s lingerie pinups (unfortunately he doesn’t do cartoon wolf noises at them too). i guess i can’t complain since that’s more or less how i talk about my posts online as well.
anyway i guess this is like a romantic comedy that set itself the admirable task of facing up to the reduced economic circumstances of many people following the 2008 crash? so tom hanks is laid off from not-walmart and unable to pay mortgage on his overpriced house and there’s some mildly depressing business around that, but at the same time, julia roberts is a community college professor teaching a single ten-person class and still able to afford a huge house and inactive blogger husband. so it’s strange. what’s even weirder is that tom hanks switches down to a moped rather than his SUV, and then suddenly falls in with a multiracial teenage moped gang that calls itself “STREET PATROL”. there’s an initiation where everyone stands around him snapping their fingers in unison ominously and then just say he’s in (“snap along, lance - or you can’t join the gang”). his entry point is this totally baffling college-age girl who seems extremely into not just getting this 55-year-old man into her moped gang but also giving him a new gang name (“lance corona”), redecorating his house, redoing his wardrobe to look like a youtube pickup artist (waistcoats over dark shirts are IN!!), kissing him on the lips in excitement and asking him to check out the tattoo on her ass, etc, nonsexually, while her Ominous Latino Bf turns out to be pretty relaxed about the whole thing if nevertheless as confused and uncomfortable as basically anybody else would be in this situation. near the very end i think she has a throwaway line of dialog that suggests the whole thing was a way to get tom hanks presentable enough to date julia roberts? evidently some kind of spirit.
there is a montage where they all ride their mopeds to the sound of tom petty’s “runnin’ down a dream”, previously also featured in the san andreas soundtrack.
also: a fullscreen shot of tom hanks’s ass struggling into tight jeans, as well as some weirdly repetitive shots of julia robert’s feet. fanservice of the 21st century?? george takei is in this as an economics professor slash mortal kombat villain who’s always filmed from an ominously low angle.
there’s a background donut store called “Donut Prince”.
the bryan cranston character is last seen driving off from his wife crazily yelling “i like biiiig knockers” before getting pulled over for a DUI and finding all his shit on the lawn the next day. truly the most prescient film yet about the assorted personalities of the alt-right.
at the end tom hank’s fashion sense has improved enough that he’s wearing a wallet chain and he gives a moving speech about his life in the navy to some awestruck college students. damn, maybe i should join the navy! there is a truly amazing credits montage involving tom hanks and julia roberts riding the moped together in front of a variety of greenscreen backgrounds while looking at the camera.
the more of these i watch the more i appreciate nia vardalos’s industry presence as a kind of trickster figure pulling the standard romantic comedy vehicle wildly offcourse into a variety of bewildering digressions. the part where he is invited to join STREET PATROL in particular felt like accidentally getting sucked down the wildly incongruous special route of a dating game.
17 Likes
1 Like