News You Can Bruise for 2022 June 4

Sat Jun 04 2022 19:07 May Film Roundup: After nearly ten years, it finally happened: we watched a movie on the last day of the month solely so I'd have something to put in Film Roundup. A busy month, I guess, with our viewing time spent on Better Call Saul (chilling!) and Strange New Worlds (excellent!).

• L.A. Story (1991): An excellent, funny, surreal rom-com. I don't know if there's any box-office truth to the stereotype that men only watch rom-coms when obligated to by "the old ball and chain", but I do like this genre a lot better when the humor has some edge (like Remember the Night (1940) or Intolerable Cruelty (2003)), or when it's really weird and goofy, as it is here. Great humor, solid emotional beats, and good chemistry, as you'd hope for when your two leads are married IRL. Also, Muppets-style cameos galore, a tradition that I wish more comedies would adopt, except sometimes bad comedies do it and it just makes me dislike them more.

  Tip for screenwriters: early on, this film establishes a platonic friendship between the male lead and a secondary woman character, solving what we in the rom-com-ology business call the "Clark Gable conundrum" and priming the viewer to read his wackiness as eristic.

  We saw this on DVD, and the DVD seems to have been made around 1997, which is early enough for not-that-entertaining "special features" and Easter eggs, but not yet in the golden age of historically useful director commentaries.

  SanDeE*'s name is not given its proper respect in the credits (Sarah Jessica Parker is just credited as "Sandy"), but it's correct on the IMDB page.