Living the Romantic Comedy

Meryl & Ellie

How do we mortals experience a little glimpse of heaven on Earth?  For some, it's a certain recipe for beef bourguignon, published in 1961, that reputedly transformed the eating habits of America.  For me and many others of my generation, it begins with a unique drum figure first heard in 1963, in two bars of music that announced one of the wonders of the rock'n'roll world: bum-bum-bum-BAP, bum-bum-bum BAP!

This opening salvo (played by legendary studio drummer Hal Blaine) at the top of the Ronettes' Be My Baby has been a part of the genetic code of popular music ever since.  People have been cooking Julia Child's beef perhaps more than ever, with the release of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia;  no doubt many have recently dusted off their copies - or purchased their mp3s - of the Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry-penned classic single (produced by Phil Spector) to savor in the wake of Greenwich's death.  I happened to catch up with Julie & Julia only days after Ellie's passing, and was struck by the juxtaposition of master songwriter with a master thespian.

Love her or hate her, Meryl Streep's artistry is undeniable, and hard as it may be to believe, she is the only contemporary actress in America whom studios can currently depend on to open a movie - at the age of 60.  How exceptional is that?  Watching her as Julia Child, lighting up and wiping up the screen with her younger co-star (one feels bad for the delightful Amy Adams, in a thankless role that was even less sympathetic on the page), I found myself thinking of Ellie Greenwich.

With her partner Jeff Barry, Ellie entered a predominately male world in the early '60s, and proceeded to kick major butt, almost single-handedly creating the wildly popular "girl group sound" that dominated American airwaves at the time of the British invasion.  Mike Ragogna's informative Huffington Post tribute quotes some eye-witnesses:

"Ellie was a real pioneer both as a songwriter and producer," Tommy West explained. "She was one of the first women to break through the exclusive men's production club. Sometimes she had to get down to a man's level to get them to listen, and there were times when she would cry after a session because they wouldn't listen to her as readily as they would a man. But her legacy is one that will never be duplicated."

Meryl, when she first came on the scene, was up against similar resistance.  Famously dismissed by Dino DeLaurentis when she auditioned for his King Kong remake ("She's ugly," he commented to his son in  Italian, "Why did you bring me this thing?"), she had an uphill climb in the Hollywood trenches, even after winning her first Oscar (Supporting Actress in The Deer Hunter).  Here's an interesting bit from Wikepidia:

Asked to comment on the script for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in a meeting with the producer Stan Jaffee, director Robert Benton and star Dustin Hoffman, Streep insisted that the female character was not representative of many real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles, and was written as "too evil." Jaffee, Benton and Hoffman agreed with Streep, and the script was revised.

That Streep will inevitably receive yet another Oscar nom for her turn as Julia seems only fitting, given the similarities of gender struggle common to both famous women (the movie chronicles how Child out-cooked the men at her Cordon Bleu classes and overcame male publishing prejudices - with the help of some smart female editors - to get her eventual bestseller published).

So where is Ellie's movie?  You could say that in a sense it's already been made, in the form of Allison Anders's Grace of My Heart, which was loosely based on a fictionalized version of songwriter Carole King's career, Brill Building days and all.  But there are some choice nuggets in Ellie's own saga I'd love to see on the screen, such as the time producer Jerry Wexler asked Ellie to work on the back-up vocals for Aretha Franklin's Chain of Fools (the result is another piece of pop music history).

To contemplate Julia, Meryl and Ellie is to behold power (Put on River Deep, Mountain High today and it's still like... stand back!)  Yet Streep's anecdote about being cast in Deer Hunter ("They needed a girl between the two guys and I was it") sounds like almost any young actress discussing the vagaries of casting, circa 2009.

Same as it ever was and ever will be?  Maybe not for long.  From Beyonce to Imogen Heap, women to be reckoned with are still having at it, in spite of it all.  There may never be another Ellie Greenwich, but her spirit (a-woh-oh-oh) lives on.

 

Cinematic Dementia

Will Quentin Tarantino ever grow up?  I think we can assume by now that the answer is no.  So where does that leave the rest of us?  Fans of Pulp Fiction (or for that matter, Reservoir Dogs) have either long since abandoned the director or doggedly kept up with his oddball output since 'the early good ones.'  I got off the Tarantino train right in the middle of Kill Bill (i.e. was mesmerized but sickened by 1 and never did see 2), but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to check out the reputed "masterpiece" he's taken over a decade to produce.

Here's the weird thing: Though on some levels the movie is a godawful travesty, on others it's downright masterful; I wasn't emotionally affected much by it... yet images from Inglourious Basterds have lodged in my head and refuse to go away.

Almost a textbook definition of guilty pleasure (the movie is utterly indefensible in terms of its infidelity to the world that exists beyond the silver screen, and in terms of its confused, even incomprehensible morality), Basterds is nonetheless a delirious celebration of movies.  Its excesses are indeed wretched, but the film geek in me can't help but be tickled by its harebrained passion for all things cinematic.  Nearly its entire plot revolves around a movie premiere, and this is the only mainstream feature ever made (I think) that designs its entire climax around the literal use of film reels and nitrate film stock.

So what? would be the reaction of naysayers - I'm not saying this filmo-centric focus is a good thing, it's just... How often do you get to sit in a theater and watch a talented filmmaker lose his mind?  It's the cinematic equivalent of a car wreck. 

And a glorious wreck it is.  Despite everything that's wrong with Basterds, there are things in it that are notably right.  Here's three reasons why Tarantino's latest is worth seeing.

1) It's fun to watch a star being born.  If you've read one review or spoken to a single person who's seen the movie, you've heard about Christoph Waltz.  Hitherto unknown in this country, an Austrian actor of some European renown, Waltz is going to work like crazy over here now (should he so choose), because you walk out of Basterds talking about his performance as one of the great villains of all time (inarguably the strongest screen Nazi since Ralph Fiennes in Schindler).  The camera loves Waltz, and whenever he's on screen, you're a happy camper.

Tarantino's own script has done him in, unfortunately, since Waltz can't play any scenes with Brad Pitt for most of the film's two and a half hour length - a shame, in that it's nice to see Pitt play an actual part for a change, instead of merely being a presence, and Tarantino's best dialogue is found in two-hander scenes between well-matched foils (see: Cheeseburger Royale).  A major problem with the movie is that Waltz walks away with it: not exactly the right effect, when a Nazi is the thing you like best in a rabidly anti-Nazi picture.

2) The imagery is ravishing.  Like I said, still seeing the images and colors, particularly red - not the red of bloody violence but the crimson of lipstick, of a fabulous evening gown, of Third Reichian drapery.  I'm still haunted by little gestures writ large - the twitch at the corner of an eye, the splayed fingers of a hand in the air, the whipped cream on top of a piece of strudel.  I keep replaying the most outrageous image of the movie's thoroughly over-the-top climax in my mind: avoiding spoilers, I'll just say it has to do with black and white and smoke.

Tarantino's first features had a funky, slapdash, gritty look to them, but here, with able D.P. Robert Richardson behind the lens and a sumptuous period production design by David Wasco, his work really has entered the pantheon of movie-movie beauty - even if the content behind those images is often absolutely whacko.

3) It's an object lesson in sustaining the moment.  Here's what separates the men from the boys in director-ville: Any schmuck with a camera can construct a scene from a welter of two-second shots, using flashy montage techniques to create at least the illusion of an event (see: the career of Michael Bay).  But it takes real balls to let a scene play - to have your actors sit at a table and talk and not cut away, but instead, to trust in the beat-by-beat tension that happens when actors act and the drama unfolds.

Tarantino's opening scene is perhaps his best here; it's certainly the most grounded, and once we're past the obligatory homages (a shot cribbed from Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the de rigeur hat-tip to Ford's The Searchers), we're able to experience the rare joy of simply hanging out in a scene that knows what it wants to do and does it well.  The movie begins to subtly slip off the rails right after this opening tour de force ends, but while we're in it... Not too many writer/directors can be this kind of brave about letting the seconds tick by, and it's a scene that's apt to stay with you for some time to come.

See the movie, let it pass?  Inglourious Basterds is not for everyone.  The annoying subtext one feels is that it's for Tarantino, period - the perpetual adolescent lost in an incoherent film fever dream.  But here and there, in spite of itself, Basterds transcends being sublimely awful, and approaches the nearly sublime.

Love and Disability

Story analysts for the studios live in a state of consistent incredulity.  Not a day goes by when we aren't confronted with a piece of material and/or a business decision that defies logic.  Why did this Useless Executive champion a piece of absolute drek?  Why did the studio pass on this killer script we loved?

The true coin of the WTF? realm, however, has to do with choices made by writers in project after project, where the world we live in is routinely discarded in favor of only-in-a-movie un-realities, and nowhere is the "this would never happen" plaint more common than in the romantic comedy genre.

He's a this, and she's a that, and high jinks ensue because of contrivance X, which ultimately causes this unlikeliest of potential couples, after singing karaoke pop tunes from another decade into a hairbrush, to go running to the airport to make declarations of love.  Uh-huh.  And I will now fart tweety-birds out my butt while rocketing into outer space to spray-paint "Obama Wants to Off Your Grandma" on the moon.

What I often find myself wondering - in a spate of stare-at-the-wall procrastination that's obligatory in the midst of covering such specs - is why more writers of romantic comedy don't base their characters and situations on people and circumstances encountered in real life.  That's where one finds stuff, genuinely outrageous and near-unbelievable, that nonetheless has an air of relate-able, comprehensible truth to it.

I've come across some of the most intriguing movie notions, for example, in the New York Times wedding "Vows" column of their Style section, and this Sunday's was a doozy.  The article, written by Francesca Segre, starts out with a great setup:

Before asking Anne Miller out on an official first date, Michael Davoli knew he had to make two major disclosures. “I was terrified how she might react,” he said. “I didn’t think she would break up with me, but it was one of those things. You don’t know. You can’t help but be afraid.”

 Nice teaser.  The cute meet's pretty good, too:

A friend had introduced them at a concert in fall 2005, and they happened to see each other again the following February when he was coincidentally moving into the same Albany apartment building where she lived.  They recognized each other, and she immediately offered to watch his beloved Weimaraner on the stoop while he and his father hauled boxes to the third floor.

Within the week, he locked himself out of his apartment, and because she was the only person he knew in the building, he knocked on the door of her second-floor apartment. She used a credit card to jimmy his door open.  “She’s hot, my dog likes her and she picked my lock,” he thought. “That’s pretty cool.”

The story goes on to its very effective first act turning point: Michael makes the first of his major disclosures, which is that he has Tourette's syndrome, manifesting itself in...  a combination of physical tics including constant eye-blinking, head-nodding and rapid arm movements. “I wanted her to know I may never be able to hold her hand in the way I would want to,” he said. “I needed to know she’d be O.K. with that.”

You really should read the entire article to enjoy, among other things, the nice surprise of Michael's second major disclosure.  The couple's story is poignant, even moving, and while it includes no dashes to the airport, mistaken identities or scenes of a forlorn Anne eating a tub of ice cream by herself, I'd say it's pretty damn good rom-com material.

It reminds me of the not-bad romantic comedy/dramedy Adam, currently in theaters: a boy-meets-girl story where the boy is afflicted by Asperger's, a form of autism.  Adam is the sort of small, indie-flavored picture that some may find delightful and others, deplorable.  I kind of liked it, mostly, though I found the sentimentality too strong (one Hollywood-unreality in this movie is its Hallmark card vision of New York City).

But the thing is, unlike say, Rain Man, the movie manages to deal with the characterization of its disabled protagonist in a largely realistic way; the story is bracingly un-sentimental in its third act crisis and resolution.  And I liked that the central romantic relationship exhibited the kind of detail work you only get from real-life research (apparently organizations associated with Asperger's have generally given writer/director Max Mayer their seal of approval).

I'm not saying that one needs to write about the disabled to find conflicts as dramatic as those trumped up in a contrived rom-com.  An African-American journalist friend of my wife's once went to interview a white teacher who'd been accused of racism, found the accusation to be baseless and that he cooked a great lasagna... and they've been married for fifteen years.

I suppose I'm merely pointing out that there's enough weird-flavored, unexpected reverals and conflict to be found in the romantic lives of neurotypicals (as those afflicted with Asperger's term "normal" folk), if the alert screenwriter is willing to take a look.  Read the paper.  Go for a walk, talk to a friend - you might just come across the kind of material that makes you say, They can't make up this stuff up. 

Aha!  Now you've got my attention.  Keep it real as you write about it, and the story lovers of the world will salute you.

No Success Like Failure

There's a running gag in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories: The comedian, playing a writer/director much like himself named Sandy Bates, attends a festival of his work where he keeps running into fans who tell him they love all his films, "especially the early funny ones."  The joke is ultimately topped late in the movie when a flying saucer lands in the countryside where the festival's being held, and a martian named Og alights.  When Sandy asks him, "If nothing lasts, why am I bothering to make films, or to do anything, for that matter?" Og replies: "We enjoy your films. Particularly the early funny ones."

Consider the plight - if you can stand to - of Judd Apatow.  The backlash against his Funny People began with its release, as many viewers and critics wondered why this wildly successful funnyman filmmaker (comedy in the 2000s will be remembered, for better or worse, as the Apatow era) was trying to be say, James L. Brooks.  This is the age-old no-win paradox of being an artist and/or entertainer: Give the people exactly what they bought the last time, and you're accused of being stuck in a no-growth rut; give them something new, and you're attacked for not giving them that thing they loved the first time.

In Apatow's case the irony is inescapable.  Because when else in your career should you have earned the latitude to try something different, than right after you've had two massive hits in a row?  Yet the schadenfreude surrounding the soft opening of Funny has been loud and shrill, and reporting the movie's poor performance in its second weekend (nearly a 70% drop-off in attendance), the industry and its watchers sound positively gleeful in pronouncing the movie a failure.

We should all fail so successfully.  There's actually a lot of good work in Funny People.  Apatow's sweet spot - exploring the cruel but loving crux of male camaraderie - gets hit with frequent finesse (the terrible trio of Jason Schwartzman, Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen is a joy to hang with).  Some of the gags are choice.  And love it or hate it (my sentiments lie squarely in the middle), FP is clearly the movie its director wanted to make - which is, of course, a good part of its problems.  I heart roughly half of this movie, and here's three reasons, I think, why not too many people have gone whole hog for Funny People:

1. It's too freakin' long.  Only a writer-director too confidant in having an audience would be this over-indulgent.  FP is a rambling, meandering shaggy dog tale of a story that could easily have lost 30 minutes of running time, thus coming in at under 2 hours (and if Mr. Allen could bring his serious/funny Crimes and Misdemeanors in at 1 hour and 44...). 

Even if you're not aware that Apatow's own kids play the two kids who are chomping up screen time in the movie's back end, you find yourself reaching for a fast-forward button, thus rendering the phrase kill your babies (aka kill your darlings) unusually apt.  It's this kind of "I do it because I can" sensibility - the director indulging his taste in both musical playlists and celebrity cameos - that makes FP so frequently annoying.  And judicious cuts throughout its first two-thirds would have made it seem less like two different movies (the "funnyman w/ fatal illness" movie and the "funnyman wants his wife back" pic).

2. It wants to have its cake and eat it.  FP takes pot shots at the kind of inane, facile comedy features and sitcoms that make a fortune by appealing to the lowest common denominators of humor and sentimentality.  Yet it sets a new record for the amount of dick jokes in a single picture (I gave up keeping count early on, so take this on faith), while appealing to our sympathies with the all-time basest of base manipulations: it's that story of the lovable jerk who's going to die.

FP can't talk out of one side of its mouth without the other side contradicting it.  Anytime the hapless Seth Rogen character starts to get weepy, his Adam Sandler boss slaps him out of it - yet we're constantly being asked to feel sorry for this Man Who Has Everything and Abuses It All.  Betrayal and treachery are decried, then acknowledged as a necessary evil; Sandler's superstar George Simmons character is clearly a narcissistic monster... but a good guy in his heart.  Even the central plot twist of the movie is a classic Hollywood compromise - going dark, only to suddenly let in the light.

I suspect there is a leaner, meaner, uncomfortably cynical little movie hiding in the shadows of this one.  That pull-no-punches picture would've been tougher and more daring.  But Apatow wants to have it both ways.  Some of the movie's funniest bits come from its shrewdly observed moments of the sort of comedic mean-spiritedness that dwells in the realm of show biz comedy.  Yet it seems that finally, Apatow's warm-and-fuzzy core can't let such mean truths rule the day.  So what we end up with is a meal that's too sweet and sour.

3. It's telling us things we don't want to hear.  There's an expression that a friend of mine and I use to describe someone who's bitching and moaning about some supposedly horrific problem that isn't actually so serious in the larger scheme of things.  That actor who thinks it's the end of the world when he can't make the movie he wants to make during a hiatus from his hit TV show?  We call this crying in your swimming pool.

FP is about a guy who's rich and famous and miserable.  Is this, in the summer of 2009, what America wants to get emotionally invested in?  Apatow is at his smartest, funniest and most incisive here when he's portraying the bitchiness, the cutthroat competition, and the nasty egotism that's coin of the realm in this business of show, and my laughter during FP was often the harsh laughter of recognition.  But folks in Kansas aren't as liable to be in on the joke, and they especially aren't likely to cotton to being blamed for the rich, famous miserable guy's unhappiness.  One of the tacit tropes of the movie is that Sandler's character has dumbed himself down to make money off the dumb.  Can you make fun of the very audience you're hoping will make you a hit?  Evidently, nuh-uh.

Meanwhile, I must say there's a perverse pleasure in watching Adam Sandler finally play a smart, mature, non-pandering adult, in a role that feels ominously close to his not-so-funny bone.  Though it isn't his truly inspired Punch Drunk Love turn, it's probably as close as we'll ever get to getting the real Sandler deal (whether we want to get it is another issue).  One only wishes the writer had truly let his star go as dark and as cruel as he's clearly capable of being.

As for Apatow, bravo: He's gotten it out of his system, and he's given us some truly funny scenes to relish.  He hasn't yet solved the problem of how to write a credible female (Leslie Mann's character is perhaps the least convincing contrivance of the movie).  But maybe after he pulls his camera out of his own swimming pool, he'll be ready to hit another one out of the park.

Big Screen Shrews v. Small Screen Truths

I had an e-mail the other day from my good friend Bob Dolman, enclosing this link to an L.A. Times article by Mary McNamara, which represents a prevalent state of perplexity in both the critical and moviegoing public community:

Watching Katherine Heigl attempt to inject life into yet another cardboard cut-out of a controlling, manic working woman in "The Ugly Truth," you have to wonder: For this she wants to leave television?...

There are more and better roles for women on one season of "Brothers and Sisters" and "Big Love" or "Damages" and "Desperate Housewives" than there will be in an entire year of Hollywood films. Roles that require depth and wisdom and boundless energy, that demand of their performers the dramatic flexibility and exploration of character. Roles that don't seem to punish them simply for being women.

Unfortunately, an actress who wants to be a movie star doesn't have that kind of choice, especially now that bromance has replaced romance and so many comedies seem happy to dispense with women altogether.

Bob's e-mail went on to query: "What is it I wonder that makes so many movies so bland in the romcom department?  It’s as if the TV execs are saying 'more like movies' and the movie execs are saying 'more like TV' ...But then there’s a TV crowd who want their TV lives to be spicier." 



How I see it is that studios sell "situations" when they pitch and develop movies - then they try to write characters into them.  On the other hand TV series, particularly on cable, tend to write and develop character-driven material, precisely because such concepts have to feature substantive characters to sustain a series.  You tune in to see what happened to Jane/John (i.e. What terrible fix have they gotten into now?), not because there's a new "event," necessarily, but because you want to see how this character responds to a given situation. 

Note that when a long-running TV series is feeling low on character-driven developments, they a) introduce new characters or b) go for the event, e.g. ER having a chopper crash into the hospital, or a criminal take hostages, etc.  By contrast it's usually not characters that pull people into a multiplex to see a movie, unless it's an "event-driven character" (Spiderman, Batman, etc.) who wouldn't be of any interest unless they were, in fact, facing some major world-threatening crisis.

The problem with women in cinema and to a lesser degree TV strikes me as analogous to the current Obama/Gates/police flare-up, i.e. We pretend that Obama being elected means we've dealt with/ transcended race, only to find that of course we haven't.  McNamara criticizes "Heigl playing a woman like this in 2009?!" as if our society had somehow dealt with/ transcended sexism, when obviously it hasn't (We're shocked, shocked, to see gambling in Casablanca).

Here's the disjunct that confounds me: With both The Ugly Truth and The Proposal doing so well at the box office this summer (i.e. trad-stereotypical, formulaic rom-com chick flicks) and women being the target demographic (btw, three women wrote Truth and a woman directed Proposal), apparently women are just fine, thanks, with everything that McNamara (and Bob and me) are decrying.  I don't really believe that, mind you, but the evidence is there in box office ducats.

These days it seems a challenge to find a reasonably recognizable human being, female or male, in American romantic comedies - you know, just like it is when you go looking for any in Congress.  I'm actually in the midst of musing on the stereotypical representation of men on the big screen (meet me here next week for a look at Funny People), but this Woman Thing - the terribly dated, stereotypical portrayals of them v. the seeming widescale acceptance of same - is a head-scratcher, so I turn it over to you.  Tell me, dear readers: What's up with that?  Living the RomCom wants to know.