If There’s a Tiger…I Give

June 6, 2009 by 1 Comment

Dear Millicent,

Kudos on your garbage! Yellow gingham and wicker: so cheery, so kempt! Also, THANK YOU for the spectacle of costuming featured below.  That green boob flash is one of those moments when I realize that, like storytelling, there maybe a finite number of ways to cut a cloth, but also an infinite chance of surprise.

Speaking of expected and unexpected patterns, I saw The Hangover last night after giggling at it’s baby in sunglasses billboard for weeks.  While Jezebel and others have lamented that this movie is one more bromance-o-rama/grossout/ roadtrip-find-ourselves production (I think Jez has taken to calling it Three Men and a Baby), I was holding my breath because of the inclusion of Zach Galifianakis and his distillation of spectacle mired in the slack human condition.  He seems to understand the glee and anger in life, and convey the ambiguous intersections of mediocrity and truth with something that isn’t quite irony.  His music videos capture this in their lighting, unmade beds, leaps, belly and old sedans. His exuberance is authentic, and rarely watered down.  I also think he probably punches people sometimes when he is drunk.

And he brings this charm to the movie, complete with unflattering pants and ace timing.  There were times where his sense of humor, his enjoyment of the joke, was strong enough to entice me further into the movie.  And yes, it is a boy movie…I wonder how far off the original script was from that of the Tom Hanks 1984 hit The Bachelor Party.    But, I laughed a lot.  There are songs, there are tigers, there are jokes about gremlins.  Las Vegas is introduced during the title sequence as a doomscape, with the Bellagio fountain roaring like a harbinger of obliteration.  It’s fantastic.  And, like I Love You, Man, the movie is supremely plot lite– –something that I have come to immensely appreciate lately.  The tensions are never actually fretful, and the drama is always outrageous or simple enough to relax me into a state of easy merriment.  As a kid, I used to get worked up with every Disney movie, Lady in the Tramp especially, because they raised the stakes so quickly to employ the drama.  It all starts as fine, but then all of sudden Lady is on the street, Ariel has lost her voice and her home, Pinocchio has that terrifying island: there was a lot of stress to get the payoff of catharsis and happy fable.  Not here– — happy fable is ensured, and the only stress in the audience is of will the humor keep up, will the script hold up until the end.  And with that, the story is weak, Heather Graham is under-used, there is a confusing breast feeding scene, and one character gets a fast change of step with no explanation.  But, my face hurt at the end because I had been laughing so much.

This brings me back to our discussion about the bromance genre.  I don’t hate it, and I tend to eat it up.  BUT, the ladies are always on the side.  Here there are four women in the movie, and while the men are weird and complicated with specific motivations, the women are flatter than flat: bitchy controlling girlfriend, beautiful responsible fiance, hooker with heart of gold, and large bottomed public servant.  That’s it.

I talked with Mr. Carla Fran on the way home about what a lady version could be…is Thelma and Louise one of the few that allowed this? And if there could be a Ladypash or homance (I like this new name even better than cronemance, but I know it can’t stand)  that was plot lite while still being three dimensional?  The show Girlfriends tried this with uneven results, and Sex in the City was often too busy connecting giant life themes to ever really let its hair down.  All other lady comedies swerve towards public service announcements (and I agree, domestic violence is bad), or chintzy sapfests. Why can only men have unvirtous adventures for the sake of shenanigans and general fuckuppery in film? While there are many people who are above that, not all of those people are women.

And luckily, there is a straight to DVD movie to prove it.  Via Women in Hollywood, I found out about Spring Breakdown, which looks like the exact thing I’m looking for, albeit with cheap production and a fairly hammy script. I haven’t seen it yet, but my fingers are crossed that it’s the start of something good.   Karina Longworth gave this enticing review from Sundance:

I suppose it’s possible to laugh at/with Spring Breakdown as gross out comedy without taking it too seriously, but throughout I could sense there was also some really interesting stuff roiling underneath the top level, without being quite able to put my finger on it until near the end. And then I realized: Spring Breakdown is a parody of Sex and the City-style media, which depict 40-something women as sex and image obsessed to the point where they might as well be adolescents, but the film enacts that parody by aping the Fight Club model. Having hit bottom by being “themselves,” with nothing left to lose, these three ladies embrace the fact that, in a time and place where there are no constraints, to be “normal” in America is to go to extremes, even if that means being extremely self-destructive. They dive deep into a nihilistic subculture of masochistic thrill seeking. Eventually, they realize that this is not the answer to their woes. But not until it’s too late to stop everything from exploding.

The movie doesn’t exactly look good, and it was released straight to DVD, which is sad, but American Pie and There’s Something About Mary all now seem crudely worked starts of this new brand of sensitive-gross-out-man humor, so maybe, this can be that?

I hope to see Up soon, and then chat with you about it, as well as Away We Go, which looks both immensely charming and highly unpalatable (mostly I think because husband and wife Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida wrote it together from notes on their own pregnancy…and named their main characters Burt and Verona (Dave and Vendela, meet Burt and Verona).  We shall see if they can charm me or back me further into my little cranky corner.

Summer, I want to spend you in the dark theater drinking soda.

Yours,

CF

Filed under Lady Parts, Movies, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

I Love You, Three Dimensional Well Written Character

May 27, 2009 by 2 Comments

Dear Millicent,

I am trying to find a phrase for the female bromance, and am not having much luck: sismance (sounds like a goiter), ladymance (sounds like a medieval weapon), cronemance (I kind of like this, but it makes me think Dune), girlcrush, or the brit term for falling in love at boarding school — –‘having a pash’?

I ask this because I just saw I Love You, Man, a title bromance, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (a supreme Netflix wonder). I was smitten with ILYM’s lack of difficulty: it is plot-lite, where even the climax is not very threatening or stressful.  I smiled at Paul Rudd throughout, and savored such lines as Jon Favreau offhandedly ordering a drink for wife, “and something with sour mix for her,” and Rudd’s father staidly announcing that his best friend is one of his sons in front of the other son.   But, the movie’s thesis is that women are friendship-a-matics: they instinctively klatch up and and share and support, while men have a hard time letting their hair down.  As Paul Rudd ventures to find friends, he encounters men wanting to date him or steal his clients, or geeks that are even less cool than he is.  His girlfriend enters the movie with a complete girl talk brigade with requisite bitch and ditz as besties.  Ladies have “girl’s nights” and drink wine.  They can sleep at each other’s houses and own boutiques together.  This doesn’t seem untrue, as much as one dimensional.

When he does meet his soul friend, they have quite the pash.  And it’s got all its dimensions.  They tell each other secrets, they support each other’s dreams, they make each other grow. The movie plays easy, so they have tilted the scales to make a more compact and satisfying formulaic tale.  The ladies have to be flat characters to foil the round joy of Rudd’s character arc with his manfriend.

But, isn’t the bromance really the story of all friendships? Doesn’t the post-college adult often flounder in isolation and miss the days where friendship was less homegenous, but very much enforced? In school there is required recess, and then the caste navigation of high school, and then dormmates and so on. Then we are released to the unwild, where people are no longer grouped by age or interest, and the world is lonelier.  Gyms and video stores and bars become the great chances of interaction.  I fuss not because ILYM is an inept representation of the difficulties of finding likeminded people, but because it’s like that way for everybody.  Women might say “I love you” to their pash a little earlier in the game, but otherwise same gauntlet.  And this is my nitpick with the Bromance/Apatow genre: it showcases its men with amazing dimensions of complexity, tenderness and contradiction and that is supposed to be the trick.  The ladies are supposed to have all of this stuff figured out, and as the men grapple and learn, we are all inclined to melt and appreciate the wit and humanity presented.  And, I usually do just that; as a critic, I am a worthless sop in the audience–I enjoy all of it.

Which brings me to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, where I lost the bet that Kris Kristofferson would wear jeans in every scene (he wears white pants, once! The rest, denim all the way).  This move explained a few things to me:

  1. Why, while growing up in Tucson, people often referred to this movie and Jodi Foster’s amazing quote “he’s even weird for Tucson, and Tucson is the capital of weird.”
  2. A parenting trend that might have influenced my parents: in the movie Alice is a single mother that talks to her precocious 12 year old like he is fully grown.  He is very astute (and could walk straight into a Wes Anderson movie), and mom makes cracks about her sex life or trouble paying the bills and then tells him to finish his dinner.  They have a loving relationship.  I wonder if divorced parents at the time, hoping to have an equally savvy and well-bonded relationship with their kids, tried to be the brassy, worldly honest type, not realizing that their own lines (and their kids) were not written in a script where the outcome is ultimately a happy one.
  3. Harvey Keitel was once a very young man.

And, we have Alice, played by Ellen Burstyn, as a successfully three dimensional lady on film.  My shock in watching the movie was how long it had been since I had seen that kind of complexity organically presented.  The movie is astounding in its motivations–every plot point has a very believable and fairly subtle reason for happening.  I have some issues with the ending–if you watch it, we must discuss–but overall, it’s a witty and complete portrait.  And, there is a gal pash, or rather, a tribute to the importance of the pash.  As Alice leaves town after her husband’s death, she and her friend have compelling goodbye scene where they both acknowledge how much they will miss each other (again, amazingly natural and heartfelt), and then later, this same friend is mentioned as Alice and Flo sunbathe in Tucson.  They have just become a united front, and Alice leans back, eyes closed to the sun and says “I forgot how good it is to talk to someone.”  The viewer feels how good these women feel in this moment.  It’s great.  I love the assumption of the movie that nobody has anything figured out, and practically every character is  their own little motor chugging through the world.

If the bromance/Apatow set , or a new think tank of entertainment, could take that kind of formula on, I’d be delighted.  I keep thinking there must be a female version of Peep Show, and all the Apatow gross-out/sentiment fests, and Juno isn’t quite it.

I love you, lady,

CF

Filed under BEST OF Millicent and Carla Fran, Movies, Nitpicks, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,