The Rebirth of the Rom-Com?

One of the main laments I've been hearing about Tinseltown is that bad flicks like Twilight and Mamma Mia! have been proving that women have an equal capacity to men when it comes to breaking the box office, but this wonderful widely acknowledged discovery came about the same time that movie journalists were announcing the death of the romantic comedy.

In fact, it was made official, several times over. Everyone, from the formidable James Wolcott and feisty Maureen Dowd (of Vanity Fair and the New York Times, respectively, for god's sake!) blamed Sex and the City 2 as the "final nail in the coffin of women's cult films". That must hurt.

James Wolcott feebly mentioned the possibility of Eat Pray Love reviving the genre. In the opinion of yours truly who saw it over the weekend, that movie is no genre lifesaver, but the movies in the previews shown before Eat Pray Love might be....

"How Do You Know"

Paul Rudd is still Perfect. I've never seen a James L Brooks movie, but I did some quickie research and Brooks feels a little like a quasi-kind-of-Terrence Malick of romantic dramadies so I have high expectations for this one.

"You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"

I'm not sure Woody Allen counts. Especially hearing the tepid word-of-mouth coming out of Cannes. But he is Woody Allen and all that so here's an honorary trailer:

Funny.

"Morning Glory"

My heart sank the moment I saw Rachel McAdams looking like Jennifer Garner's doppelganger in the cliched power-chick businesswear. It rose again as the trailer continued - hilarious Harrison Ford! A rare appearance by Jeff Goldblum! The romance reduced to an actual subplot! Might this be called progress? Even if Rachel McAdams does look a little demented at times in the trailer. I mean, just look at that shot....

"Love and Other Drugs"

I mean, it is Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, both of whom have a semblance of integrity and ambition. Yes, AH did appear in that awful Valentine Day movie that tried to pass itself off as the spunky American cousin of Love Actually, but at least Anne had only small role...I'm not sure because I refused to see the movie. Valentine's Day was one of three movies I heard my classmates actually discuss throughout the entire goddamn year, the two other films being Avatar and you-know-what.

Are screenwriters and studios alike responding to the vacuum of decent romantic comedies? My fingers are crossed. Not really. I've never crossed my fingers in real life. But you know what I mean.

**Update: Forgot to include this one - the much-buzzed about Sundance documentary, though most doubt that it's a legitimate documentary. With the inclusion of Facebook as a main plot device and hinted themes like online psychology, it's shaping up to be a kind of zeitgeist for our age. I'm terribly interested.

"Catfish"

Fanpeople

Argument with a person over The Hours today. I said that I loved the ending scene and that last shot of Nicole Kidman sliding into her watery grave (made beautiful by the cinematography and Philip Glass' score) but that it was melodramatic and pretentious; she said it was not. Just that. "It's not". Personally, I think that she confused emotional resonance with quality. That kind of reaction just bothers me, frankly. You can acknowledge that something that reponds to your inner needs and desires can also be a piece of trash, subjectively speaking. The aesthetically pleasing can also be devoid of any real meaning. There's merit in both viewpoints. That's what separates the despicable fanperson from the thinking and the aware.

*By fanperson, I mean anyone who vouches for a pop culture subject to such an extreme degree that he/she refuses to acknowledge even a differing opinion that is less than fervently positive.

**Thought more about this after seeing Eat Pray Love over the weekend - it was a pretty meh adaptation, but I saw quite a few people crying whenever Julia Roberts' Liz was depicted struggling with her failed marriage and breakups, which pretty much proves my point. They would have cried at any movie that reminded them of all the painful breakups they went through - that doesn't automatically render the movie great in its own right.

My First Movie Review

Recently stumbled upon my first-ever movie review, which I had written in freshman year. Before movies, I'd been mostly preoccupied with Amazon.com (I'm not kidding) and immersing myself in all the generally impish and lively activities most thirteen-year-olds go through with on Saturday nights, like writing searing reviews of Christopher Paolini's Eragon using multiple accounts and playing a very addictive game called "Redbeard" on Miniclip.com

Sofia Coppola has stated over and over again: This is not supposed to be a historical document. She never intended this to be something that came from the History Channel. So to the people who bash it for its historical innaccuracies, start looking at it as a MOVIE and less as a high school history project.


This is a movie about the girl herself - NO, not about the French Revolution. About a girl, and Coppola does a stunning job of fusing the audience into her world.


What Coppola is trying to do is document the personal life of a lonely teenage girl, completely ordinary except for the fac that she is queen. And we can see it - when Marie and her friends paw through endless shoes and dresses like today's girls at their favorite boutique, doing exactly what teens of today's society might do if suddenly thrust into a life of seemingly endless wealth - fulfill their dream of a play-house (or in Marie's case, a play-village), on a ridiculously extravagant birthday party (I mean, watch "My Super Sweet Sixteen" and see if you can honestly penalize Marie Antoinette.


We are able to comprehend her ignorance, her oblivion to the outside world, the seduction of Versailles, when all she sees her her Versailles bubble are the beautiful gowns, trimmed gardens and stately palace. (Think about how clueless and extravagant today's upper-class teens can be). And especially when she's constantly distracted and plagued by relentless, vicious gossip (again, teen girls can certainly empathize).


There's also beautiful visuals, and not just the lovely, succulent montages of seductive pink cakes and gowns-of-your-wildest-dreams. The use of light is extraordinary, as Coppola expertly and artfully maneuvers it to maintain the feeling she wants instilled in us - claustrophobia, fear, nostalgia, frivolity. The last shot, I thought was particularly beautiful, when a mixture of sunshine and shadow fall onto the sober, wistful faces of Marie and Louis as they look back at Versailles one last time.


Coppola is more of an artist than an entertainer, so if you were expecting big battles and The Patriot-type action scenes, be sadly mistaken. Coppola affectively employs everything in the movie for meaning - the little dialogue, the monotony and seeming repetition of Marie's life, etc.

If you are seeking to be entertained, go watch Spiderman. If you are seeking for a thoughtful, masterful, personal interpretation, watch Marie Antoinette.

I wrote it in quite a passion. MA was my first Sofia film and at the time, I was feeling that the movie was dreadfully misunderstood (incidentally the crying title of my review). In retrospect, I still agree with the things I said, though I wince a little at the spelling errors ("affectively") and wildly inventive phrases like "gowns-of-your-wildest-things". The hyphen has always been an enemy of mine, grammatically speaking. It's cute to look back on these things, isn't it? Off to hunt down my Eragon reviews. My friend and I spent, um, lots of time on them. They're funny, at least!

Is Inglourious Basterds a Jewish Revenge?

Movie Thought of the Day:

Inglourious Basterds is *not* a Jewish movie. Simply because it features revenge from a Jewish face's POV (Shoshanna) does not make it the same as if Tarantino wrote it with Jewish motives. Is there underlying sympathy towards the Jews? Duh. Does any WWII movie not? 

QT answers the question in the movie itself.

"So my character is American.....and that's controversial."

"No, it's not controversial at all. The nationality of the author has nothing to do with the nationality of the character. The character is the character. Hamlet was not British. He is Danish. So yes, this character was born in America."

See, Diane Kruger gets it.