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Mon Dec 04 2023 08:36 November Film Roundup:
- Miss Congeniality (2000): 2000? Seriously? I would have guessed earlier. I forgot to mention this one, which I watched with my uncle Leonard last month. I never thought of this before but Sandra Bullock is one of those actors who seems to choose roles with an eye towards living cool Hollywood fantasies. She's an astronaut, a hacker, she gets to drive a bus real fast... In this movie, she gets to fire a gun and undergo the Mousy Girl Makeover, all while complaining about beauty standards.
Have you, Film Roundup reader, watched a movie before? You will be able to see who the villain is pretty quickly. Tragically, not a skill they teach at Quantico. An enjoyable flick.
- You've Got Mail (1998): We've seen enough Nora Ephron screenplays now that her go-to tactics are becoming visible. In my review of 1993's Sleepless in Seattle I projected that movies' technologically mediated rom-com world into the future, where mobile apps flash thousands of faces at you until they find the one that triggers the "love at first sight" rom-com spark. You've Got Mail can be seen as the groundbreaking experiment that disproves this model of the rom-com spark.
With the introduction of dial-up online services into the rom-com-verse, You've Got Mail presents two characters who fell in love online but dislike each other IRL. They encounter each other several times without triggering the spark or showing any awareness of it. This, Ephron concludes, is because the spark requires a connection to be made between personalities, not persons. The masks we wear in public make our true selves invisible to each other, and it's only in AOL chat rooms that we can truly be known.
Oh, something about the movie itself? It was fun, but a better ending would have had Kathleen falling out with Joe, then founding amazon.com to destroy his stippled brick-and-mortar empire.
- That Thing You Do! (1996): Like the previous movie, this is part of our traditional celebration of Hanksgiving, and we watch it every November 2023. I remember seeing the end of this movie on a VCR stand in high school, which spoiled the ending, but maybe that's a good thing. My viewing partner (Lady S— of G— Manor) was afraid the whole time that this was a movie where the evil record industry guy screws over the up-and-coming band. I tried to reassure her, but to no effect. Anyway, a fun way to bathe in someone else's nostalgia, if you go in knowing there's no real villain.
In the closing credits they play some of the hundreds of songs called "That Thing You Do" that were submitted for consideration as the fictional band's hit song. Possibly the largest number of songs ever written with the same title. At the time, I remember hearing that They Might Be Giants was one of the auditioners, and thinking that this represented a rather forlorn hope due to TMBG's rather distinctive style.
I assumed that sometime between 1996 and now, this song had made it onto some compilation album that I'd missed, but looking it up just now I see that that is not the case! Maybe because they signed over the rights when they submitted the song or something. It lingered unheard until 2021, when the TMBG "That Thing You Do" was leaked onto YouTube. I've heard it now and... they tried, but Tom Hanks (who surely made this decision personally) was right to go with Adam Schlesinger's version.
- Eat Drink Man Woman (1994): A fun movie, an early entry in the "multiple rom-coms going at once" subgenre that I saw later in Love In Space. The scenes in the big restaurant kitchen blew me away, especially that first long shot, which felt like a scene from a thriller. There was even some classic DOS laptop gaming action and Microsoft Paint 3.1. I must deduct a fraction of a point for not originating the "Sir, this is a Wendy's" joke. Harsh, I know, but those are the rules. Of course, it cancels out, since all movies ever made suffer the same penalty.
- A Global Affair (1964): Did you know that Bob Hope was a data scientist responsible for drafting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child? Or at least, his character in this movie was, and we all know there's no real daylight between Bob Hope and the character he plays in his movies. In this one he's pushed into caring for an abandoned baby who's... the Messiah? The Antichrist? I dunno, the postwar internationalism of this movie forms a real Rorschach test when placed in a modern political context.
The marketing for this gender swap of The Lady Is Willing (not to mention the name of the movie) presents Bob as lecherous and vaguely Jack Nicholson-ish as delegations of ladies make eyes at him. But the actual movie, like all 1960s sex movies, shows him as nothing but put-upon and upset by the attentions of these international dames. They're seriously interfering with his golf game and his regression analysis!
In general I'm detecting an awkward changing of the guard in the 1960s, as Danny Kaye and Bob Hope hang on to roles that should have gone to Jerry Lewis and Jack Lemmon. At least Cary Grant had the good sense not to be in Man's Favorite Sport?. Hope is sixty years old in this movie, and he looks great for sixty, but by this time definitely seems more the "confirmed" kind of bachelor than the "swinging" kind.
PS: This movie's full of random UN factoids, some of which still apply. I didn't know that the UN headquarters is an extraterritorial exclave and not part of the United States or any other country. I'm pretty sure it's just that and Antarctica.
- Polite Society (2023): Loved this movie in a very particular way: this is the closest I've seen to a movie that captures the cinema-junkie fun of the Cornetto Trilogy movies. It starts out a slice-of-life movie full of references to genre movies, and then weird things start happening and it turns out to be a real live genre movie. Lots of fun. Sumana and I were also reminded of Sorry to Bother You (2018) in the specific way this one escalates.
- The Talk of the Town (1942): The kind of title you only use when you're desperate. They came up with twelve possible titles for this movie, and most of them were generic and dull, with The Talk of the Town being the dullest of all. The worst part is that The Talk of the Town was registered to Universal at the time, and Columbia had to trade away Sin Town (a better title!) to use it. So presumably this movie was originally going to be called The Talk of the Town.
This raises so many questions, some of which might be answered in my review of the bizarrely-named Upstream (1927), which lifts the curtain on a lost world of preregistered movie titles. But one question we may never see the answer to is: did Universal say "Send us whatever title you want, but it has to have 'Town' in the name. We're doing a picture about a town, by gum, and we can't lose that! Sin Town? Sure, we'll throw some sin in there."?
The movie itself certainly isn't dull, although it is somewhat dilg. Yes, my favorite pastime as the drama unfurled was making jokes about a character's unusual name. "Wow, Cary Grant is a real DILG." "He likes his borscht with a lot of dilg." "His favorite Babylon 5 alien species is the Dilgar." Sorry, I just had to get my dilgs in. Dilg is a very uncommon name but not unheard of: for example, Peter Dilg of Long Island "has one of the largest private collections in the country of windup phonographs and gramophones."
Anyway, the movie's fine. The best parts are Grant and Ronald Colman going at it like Socrates and Thrasymachus.
- Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949): We really enjoyed this Lucille Ball YIMBY comedy. I wasn't really expecting to, because my preexisting opinion about Lucille Ball was that she was a really good producer but her comedy hasn't aged well. After watching this movie, I think she's fine, and what hasn't aged well is the sitcom format.
See, in Miss Grant Takes Richmond, Ball's character is a clumsy ditz who gets in over her head, sort of like her character in I Love Lucy. If this was a sitcom, "clumsy ditz" would be the extent of her character development. Since this is a movie, we get to see her discover that being a clumsy ditz doesn't preclude you being really good at other things, like customer service and managing real estate developments. It's a more satisfying ending. Also, there's some great slapstick in this film which I don't think would have been allowed on television at the time.
- Godzilla Minus One (2023): This is very good, one of the best Godzilla movies, not least because of its refusal to zoom out from its focus on a few people who are having very bad days. Godzilla only shows up four times! This decision frustrated me while I was watching the movie, since I liked the grand (if incompetent) sweep of 2016's Shin Godzilla. But in retrospect it keeps the stakes at human scale in a movie about a very big thing (Godzilla).
This focus on the individual does mean the movie tips into cornball melodrama at a couple points, but maybe it's just a matter of degree. Maybe some people don't like seeing any level of human emotion in the hapless people who flee from Godzilla by running away in the same direction he's walking in, without really considering the possibilities of alleyways or crossstreets. (Not saying those are guaranteed safe, but give it a try, folks!) Maybe those people are at a 1, and people who really loved all the corny personal drama in this movie are at a 10, and I'm, let's say, at an 8.
Overall, I have to say I left the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed by Godzilla's invincibility.
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