Ordinarily, I would eat somebody alive for panning a movie they didn't sit all the way through. I'm getting around that by not talking about the movie itself, but rather the overall DVD experience. As it so often does, it starts with the trailers:
Did You Hear About The Morgans?
Let's clarify. This movie doesn't actually exist; it's actually a bleeding-edge multimedia art project/political statement about the stupidity of Hollywood. The proof is right in the trailer. There's no way this is actually a movie. It's too perfectly calculated a trailer—that opening bit with Hugh Grant and his bitch-boy is a joke with a narrative arc, beginning with a lame, contrived set-up, allowing Hugh to flash some sandpaper wit, all concluding with a reference to a “relationship.” Because OMG U GUISE ITS A ROEMANTIK COMEDEE LOL.
So let's see . . . somebody gets killed and Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica O'Horseface have to go into the witness protection program. In The Country! Sarah Jessica McFuckball makes a Sarah Palin joke (edgy!) And Hugh Grant and SJP fall back in love. It all gets very frantic and splintered by the end of the trailer, just like the third acts of the movies this avant-garde experiment is satirizing.
Here's the kicker, though. Because the movie itself is of so little importance in modern Hollywood, the centerpiece of the experiment was its original release date. Yes, that's right, DYHATM? was “released” the same day as Avatar. And sure, Avatar ended up being fucking terrible (Ed. Note: Avatar is really, really, really, really awful) but if there was one thing you could set your clock by in the industry, it was that anyone who went to a movie that weekend was going to see Avatar. It had been marketed just right, with just the right level of cultural saturation, and managed to convince people that they were excited.
And this is the final, clinching piece of evidence for Did You Hear About The Morgans? being an experiment commenting on bad marketing campaigns: everything about it fucking sucks. Has anyone given a flaming rat's ass about Hugh Grant in 15 years? No. Does anyone actually like Sarah Jessica Blah-Blah-Blah? Sure the show was a hit, but Kim Cattrall was the one everyone was actually interested in. The bit about giving away the entire plot in the trailer is but the capstone on the whole experiment; why would anyone want to spend two hours what they just saw in a minute and a half?
Ice Castles
Promising young skater gets injured, comes back triumphantly? I really can't tell. Drowning under mountains of goopy sentimentality, kinda pissed about this being another trailer that gives the whole movie away. But there is a place for a PG family movie with an unchallenging, diagrammatic structure about a nice girl “positive role model” type. That place just happens to be elsewhere than my DVD player.
Sleepless in Seattle
Okay, what the fuck? Bear in mind, at this point, I have literally forgotten what DVD I put in the player. It's late, I'm a little addled (actually just plain old exhaustion rather than booze or drugs), but still, it's a little alarming that I can't remember what movie's going to be coming on in 5 minutes. I also am at a a bit of a loss as to why a trailer for a movie that came out in 1993 is in front of the same movie as something that came out last December (and whenever the Ice Castles thing came out, it looks recent too).
Eventually, I get distracted by remembering how good Sleepless in Seattle was. Oh, that bygone era, when Tom Hanks had just become the massive movie star he always should have been, when Meg Ryan was Meg Ryan, and the romantic comedy formula had yet to devolve into the disturbing mess that it is today. Though, in a way, Sleepless in Seattle established the template for the “this isn't romantic, these people are actually out of their fucking minds” modern rom-com. Meg Ryan happens to hear Tom Hanks talking about his late wife on a talk radio show, falls in love with him, and kind of starts stalking him. Meg Ryan was only able to get away with this because she's Meg Ryan, but Sleepless in Seattle was a hit, so dozens more movies with lesser movie stars were made where the insanity of the heroine's actions wasn't offset by Meg Ryan's preternaturally adorable Meg Ryan-ness.
Actually, before the feature presentation even started, during the Sleepless in Seattle trailer, I started wondering about Nora Ephron. In When Harry Met Sally, she did a fairly decent job with her male characters, even though the scene where Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby are talking about Billy's divorce at a Giants game would never happen (dudes talk about chick shit during a game about as often as solar eclipses), though the fact that the dialogue rings true helps.
But Sleepless in Seattle sees Nora slip a little bit more. Rob Reiner, as Tom Hanks' buddy, is a character who simply does not exist. Dudes do not have girl talk with each other. The couple clips of Tom Hanks and Rob Reiner in the trailer consist entirely of them having girl talk. Now, in the movie itself, this actually works, as the movie is a very otherworldly, stylized thing, and is a lot more self-reflexively meta-cinematic than the average early 90s studio picture. But, in hindsight, it's a sign that Nora Ephron was slipping just a hair.
Guy writers frequently get criticized for not writing good women, or writing women who are little more than fantasy objects. Hey, I've consciously written women characters as fantasy objects before, I'm not saying I'm above such missteps. Women do it too, though. A woman writing a scene where two dudes talk articulately about their feelings and ask each other if their butt looks cute (admittedly, a pretty funny scene in SiS) is equally as fantastic as a man writing a scene where two femme chicks spontaneously start making out. Both have possibly happened at some point or other in real life. Possibly. However, as a writer, you should always be aware of how farfetched such a premise is.
Also, let's note another fuckup that doesn't really count because it was funny: dudes don't cry at the end of the Dirty Dozen, much as it worked as a joke in this. Dudes cry at the end of Field of Dreams, which is actually more limpdick, so props to Nora Ephron for letting us save testicular face.
(Ed. Note: all this negativity about Nora Ephron and Sleepless in Seattle is just foreshadowing—Sleepless in Seattle's pretty fuckin good)
Hanging Up
Huh. Another Nora Ephron movie? What the fuck is going on here? (Ed. Note: at this point, the author has still yet to remember what movie he just put in the DVD player). The only thing I really remember about this one was that it took that meta-cinematic feel Sleepless in Seattle had to a whole 'nother level, making the importance of the characters' resemblance to real people secondary to the importance of their resembling movie characters. Which, yeah, is interesting if you're high, and Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, and Lisa Kudrow are all cool, I guess, but really, when I'm high I either want to be watching art pictures from the 60s or John Lithgow invading Earth with a fake Italian accent. Personal prejudice.
And, our feature presentation . . . Julie & Julia
Hey, don't look at me, I don't know why the fuck I Netflixed this. At the same time, they sent it to me, I hadn't seen it, I figured, why not? Maybe it'll be good. The Nora Ephron trailers suddenly made sense, and that odd parallel-universe feeling I'd been having eased somewhat.
But holy shit, this movie wasn't messing around when it decided to suck. From the word go, everything is completely stilted and artificial. Amy Adams' friends seem to have beamed in from some parallel universe where people declaim instead of conversing. Amy Adams, herself, does an excellent job, but she has a bit of trouble rolling the rock up the mountain with this fuckin' dialogue.
Meryl's great, and seeing her and Stanley Tucci so mad for each other is cool, but it can't shake how godawful the Amy Adams & co. bits are in the first half hour or so, which is all I made it through. It was too painful to watch something so completely divorced from reality, and the irony that it was based on a true story made me need a drink.
Now, of course, it's possible that the movie abruptly becomes awesome at some point after I turned it off. Even though I doubt that it does, that's neither here nor there because I didn't actually take the time to find out.
Still, that being said, it's unfortunate that Nora Ephron lost her fastball, because as stylized and non-naturalistic as When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle were, they were still really fucking funny. Of course, Julie & Julia isn't a laff-a-minute farce—its intention is to be a story with funny bits in it rather than a straight-up comedy—but even the stuff that's supposed to be funny is strained, and so far removed from actual human experience that it's like “Okay . . . I guess . . .” whereas When Harry Met Sally was like “Wow, I never thought of it that way before!”
The most interesting thing about experiencing the (incomplete) picture in this fashion was the narrative created by the trailers. We started with a great example of the modern romantic comedy—manic, joyless, insane, devoid of both romance and comedy—progress to a feel-good programmer (hey, civilians need shit to enjoy too), then the tripartite Nora Ephron show. All told, it was only an hour or so out of my life, so I don't feel like I totally wasted an evening or anything, but boy it was weird and inexplicably kind of disturbing to see that drift away from reality.
Oh, well. That happened. Moving on . . .
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