Living the Romantic Comedy

Happy Diane Keaton's Birthday Day

Begin Again

That's me in my home office with Tabitha, one of our family of dogs. If you were here, she'd be tail-wagging and wiggling a welcome.

I've been off this blog for about a year, and was neglecting it for a few before that - largely because Facebook and Twitter took over my social media attention, and because the romantic comedy genre itself was in the doldrums. But as of this week, I may be leaving Facebook, for reasons that should be clear to anyone paying attention, while the romantic comedy - in the wake of Crazy Rich Asians and 80 million Netflix subscribers embracing a new crop of funny love stories like To All the Boys I've Loved Before - is back in force.

I like being where I can share interesting stuff and just sound off about whatever, while engaging friends and strangers in conversation about it. It does say "other topics apropos" above, under Living the Romantic Comedy, so I'll be here appreciating the world and analyzing the likes of anything from The Kissing Booth to Karl Ove Knausgaard and beyond.

Happy to have you aboard, first time visitors and returning readers alike. I'm currently working on the revised and expanded 20th Anniversary edition of Writing the Romantic Comedy, which Harper/Collins will publish in early 2020, so as I wrestle with putting the genre's last 20 years in perspective, all input welcomed! Please do comment, and I promise to reply. 

A Million Views

There was a fine white mist at the foot of the Santa Monica mountains as I biked up the path early this morning - my last bike ride on the beach as a resident of Venice: Tater and I are moving to the suburban wilds of North Hollywood tomorrow. It'll be quite a change, as I've lived in Venice for 23 years, but as we're trading a small two bedroom apartment in the over-traversed epicenter of West Side hipsterism for a three-bedroom house with yard and garage, etc. in a charming, quiet neighborhood... Well, I bought a bike rack for the car. I'll happily trek out here once a week.

Seems perfectly synchronistic that Living the Romantic Comedy is celebrating its tenth anniversary this weekend - end of an era, and all that - though not end, I hasten to clarify: I intend to keep blogging, for as long as it's still fun. But the blogger's landscape has certainly changed since I first moved into this neighborhood, ten years ago.

In June, 2005, Facebook wasn't yet as ubiquitous and Twitter didn't exist, let alone all the other platforms. And though I was late to a party that was still going strong - at the time, you could tell someone you had a blog without getting an eye-roll in response - it was a heady, stimulating community to join, especially in screenwriting site circles. These days, to have an active blog makes you feel a little... quaint. It's a bit like writing in longhand and sending an actual letter.

The most exciting aspect of it, inarguably, was and still is getting a response. These days we're all used to being liked, shared, favorited, and retweeted, but back then it was a more novel experience to blather on about something online, and suddenly get agreement, or disagreement about it from a total stranger. By the time Living RomCom was going strong, it wasn't uncommon for me to get 25-35 comments on a given post. That's astonishing, then and now.

The essential experience - reflected for me in the title of the blog - has been of growing up in public (I like to think I'm still growing), and when I looked back, digging up things to re-post this month, I saw all manner of momentous events annotated here: In my very first post, I was wondering how to write a dating site profile, and over the course of a decade, after seeking romance in all the wrong and nearly-right places, I found true love in my third and final wife; America elected its first president of color; my first novel sold to a major publishing house; and my beloved father passed away.

What I hadn't quite foreseen was a major sea change in my genre of choice. No, the romantic comedy is not dead, as I've exhaustively discussed in these pages, but in the past few years, a certain kind of formulaic chick flick (I call it the Career Girl Gets Alpha Guy movie) has finally lost its audience. I myself had dutifully supported the so-called formula of the traditional romantic comedy, but I lobbied fiercely here for more progressive fare.

One of the things that keeps me blogging about the genre, in fact, is that the rom-com seems to be morphing into something newly relatable, as such hits as Silver Linings Playbook and Her have demonstrated. I'll go out on a very short limb now to declare that when Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer's Trainwreck (which I did notes on for Universal) comes out in a few weeks and makes millions, you're suddenly going to hear - from the same people who danced on the rom-com's grave last year - that "romantic comedy is back!"

Such is the ever-cyclical nature of the industry. Meanwhile, what truly makes the blogging practice worthwhile continues to be the people I come in contact with by doing it, from my first-ever commenter Caroline Ferguson to the blog's most stalwart fan E.C. Henry. I'm amazed and gratified to talk with not just friends, but folks from all over the world on a weekly basis.

Probably the most humbling of such encounters occurred when a former consult client living in Eastern Europe informed me that having read a certain Living Rom-Com post had helped her to make a major life decision about when and how to have a baby. Her child is over a year old now, and the idea that something I wrote on this blog could turn me into a sort of cyber-godfather fills me with awe.

That's the thing, I guess: What I've mostly learned here is that when you write something and offer it to the world at large, you can never know what effect it may have, even on people you don't and may never know. And this is the best endorsement for facing one's fears and continuing to write that I can think of.

Thank you all, at any rate, for keeping me company thus far. And please comment to let me know what you'd like to see more (or less of) on this blog. Largely due to the efforts of blog colleague Scott Myers, whose promotion of a recent post currently has my total page view numbers at 999,690 and rising, I'm within 300+ hits of reaching one million by the day's end. You, my friend, may even be my millionth viewer!

May your days be filled with love and laughter.

(Illustrations by Adrian Tomine) 

Mythbusting: The Good Writer and the Bad Execs

A Tenth Anniversary Re-Post: March, 2007

Myths abound in our myth-making movie biz. There’s the myth of director as God – addressed by screenwriter Robert Riskin when he thrust a sheaf of blank screenplay pages at Frank Capra and said, “Put the ‘Capra touch’ on this!” There’s the myth of starlets discovered in coffee shops, of producers who move their lips when they read; there’s the William Goldman-penned myth of Nobody knows anything (actually, a number of people know a hell of a lot; a more accurate credo would have been ‘Nobody knows everything’).

But there’s one pervasive myth in the industry that I’ve yet to see addressed in print, and I’ve had enough of its dogged perpetuation. It’s the one that goes: Writer good, executives bad.

You’ve heard it countless times – the gifted but beleaguered writer whose work has been unaccountably butchered by the stupid, philistine studio executives (always the insidious plural). The writer, in white hat, doing his best for the cause of cinematic artistry is an underdog rugged individualist hero who’s being unjustly repressed (and rewritten) by heinous, mercenary corporate studio thugs who lack only black hats and mustaches to twirl to complete the mythic scenario.

I know I’m going to catch hell for this, but sorry, as a professional writer who also works for a studio as a story analyst and thus sees both sides of the equation on a daily basis, I gotta say that this perception of writer as saint and executive as Satan-incarnate is just a crock.

Believe it or not, there is such a thing as a bad writer. There is such a thing as a good and helpful studio executive. And to retire this bogus good/bad dichotomy altogether, let me put it another way: sometimes an uncooperative or unskilled writer does more harm to a movie in development than the useful, smart execs who are trying to make a better movie in spite of the writer’s failings.

Blasphemy, I know. And yes, of course there are horrible, useless executives who mess with material just to piss on it, there are execs who know nothing about writing who make ridiculous suggestions; there are writers a-plenty who do know better about what works and what doesn’t but get unduly constrained by the powers-that-be; there are writers who are fired on projects, only to be re-hired by the same studio after three other writers have gotten nowhere with the material. Yes, yes, happens all the time.

But what also happens all the time is that writers screw up. Since I don’t want to lose my day gig (while I’m losing all my screenwriting friends), I can’t name names and tell tales out of studio school here, so you’ll have to take the following on faith. But here’s the deal from inside the belly of the studio beast: quite often writers are hired for gargantuan sums of money to pen a studio project, and what we have, as they say, is a failure to communicate.

The writer has one idea of what the movie should be, the studio has another… and nothing but headaches follow. I write up notes on the project, an executive follows suit, a document goes to the writer, and… what comes back is nothing like what’s been discussed. For example, last year I did exhaustive notes on a movie, recommending some fairly serious overhauls of characterizations and plot trajectories… and what the next draft delivered was the equivalent of rearranging deck furniture on the Titanic. None of the more important issues cited – not a one – had been addressed, for whatever reasons, by the writer.

Most probably this writer will be fired. And the studio’s just wasted a lot of time and money. And the project is in jeopardy. So who wins?

Studio story departments' known if well-kept secret is that nine times out of ten, if you pull coverage of a movie out of the files and set it beside the reviews that the released film has received, the critique is virtually identical (especially when the movie’s not so good) down to the specific language. Reader and critic alike speak of “contrived plot developments” and a “lack of credibility in the character’s motivations,” etc. So if the studio was wrong, if all the critics are wrong, and if the audience is wrong (i.e. the movie’s tanking)… how right can the writer be? Chances are (after decades of complaining that these guys take all the credit), he’ll blame the director.

I’ve seen one Big Name Writer hired by the studio to do a rewrite hand in a draft that read, as my story editor reported, as if said Name had been paid a little under a million dollars to take the last draft out of its box, retype the title page and then put the draft back inside the box again. And I’ve seen a head of production at the studio badger a writer-director into shooting an ending that everyone, award-nabbing helmer included, later agreed had turned a potential turkey into a trophy-winner.

Another awful truth: There’s maybe all of about a dozen or so screenwriters who the studios trust to be dependably solid and skilled, even inspired, on all craft levels. These closers (as in “they can close the deal”) form an amazingly small, select club. Used to be Towne and Goldman; these days Richard LaGravanese, Steve Zaillan, Scott Frank and Paul Attanasio are among the elite who get serious money thrown at them to get the job done when there’s a lot at stake. So what does that tell you about the craft of screenwriting and the business of movies getting made? Evidently your average screenwriter sometimes needs a little help. 

Here’s a couple of screenwriters sitting around talking, in this case 2007 Oscar-nominees Peter Morgan (The Queen) and Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine), from [an L.A. Times Calendar article, link no longer available]:

MORGAN: ...People concerned with the marketing of the film said, "Well, it's a hell of a movie. And right now, hers [Helen Mirren's] is a good performance, but it's not an Oscar performance. So, Pete, would you write an argument, or a scene where she's angry, in the first act?" I said to Stephen [Frears], "I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is, there isn't enough Tony Blair." ... Stephen put his foot down, and we shot four extra days of Tony Blair. The net effect was that by putting in counterpoints, his part feels no bigger, but her part feels enormous, without shooting a single extra frame of Helen Mirren.

ARNDT: I just want to jump in and say that everything that got added to the original script of Little Miss Sunshine was an improvement. There was nothing that I was forced to put in that I didn't think was better, and there was nothing taken out that I wanted to be in there.

Check it out: Morgan’s saying he got a note that he didn’t entirely agree with, but he found a way to arrive at a proper solution. The specifics of the Stupid Studio Exec note might have been off the mark, but apparently the executives were right, in that something did need to be adjusted (a common phenomenon, see this post on “looking beneath the note”). So why didn’t the execs give a smarter note? Um, maybe because they’re not writers. It was the writer’s job to solve the problem, which he did, ingeniously, without disturbing the integrity of the piece. And everybody won, including the audience.

And Michael Arndt’s response is kind of astonishing. I mean, I’ve experienced this myself – shrewd, thinking development people helping a writer to more fully realize what he hadn’t got exactly right from the get. But the astounding thing is that Arndt was big enough to admit it. Man, you’ll never succeed in Hollywood if you voluntarily give other people credit for their contributions to your work, right?!

As of this past Oscar night, another myth busted.*

[*Arndt won Best Screenplay Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine.]

Romantic Comedy Classics #8

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The tenth anniversary of its release seems an appropriate moment to celebrate the existence of this Charlie Kaufman-Michel Gondry collaboration, a film that arguably increases in stature as time goes by, and to emphasize once again that yes: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romantic comedy.

The movie is also a sci-fi fantasy drama, but it's motored by the central question of "Will these two become a couple (again)?" and it's blacky comedic in tone, with a quasi-happy ending, so in my book - literally - it qualifies: call it a rom-com hybrid if you'd like to get technical. And for those of us who like our romantic comedies substantive, emotionally powerful, unique in story concept, and inspired in execution, it doesn't get much better than this.

When I'm asked what my favorite rom-coms of the new century are thus far, ESOTSM invariably comes to mind. In the years since its release, the only rom-com that's seemed to me to be as insightfully zeitgeisty is Spike Jonze's Her (also a hybrid), and one can't help thinking that Jonze might not have gotten to Her without his first having been so intimately involved with Sunshine's creator.

Regardless, a lot of the raw pull in ESOTSM lies in its fanciful and beautifully realized grappling with a universal idea: Who among us has not, at some point in our romantic history, wished we could simply erase a painful relationship from our memory? Where Kaufman, Gondry and stars Carrey and Winslet take this premise is marvelously startling. The film is that rare achievement of an imaginative concept developed even more inventively than one might expect, which is one reason why it holds up so well on repeated viewings.

Like any great work of art, Sunshine continues to matter, transcending genre, rich with nuanced meaning and alive with deeply felt emotion. Due to its dazzlingly complex structure and the crazed poetry of its impossible-made-real imagery, there's always more to see in it. And it does one thing that's rare for the rom-com turf: it allows room for ugliness, messiness, twisted edges that can't be unbent.  

Kate Winslet's Clementine is equal parts beautiful and horrible; Jim Carrey's Joel has issues that won't quit. For once, both lovers in love aren't good at it. They share responsibility for their perhaps insoluble problems because they can't be other than who they are, as they struggle to keep their love for each other alive with an awkwardness and anger we recognize from real life.

Also accurate is the film's presentation of the byzantine ways in which memory and the mind work, replicating familiar processes of thought that - outside of say, Proust - are generally thought too subtle and convoluted to convey.

At one point, when Joel peers past the edges of his own consciousness, we see beyond what's lit into the dark recesses of a stage set, and it feels like glimpsing the fading memories of a dream. At another, the sensation of remodeling, losing the actual memory even as we attempt to grasp it is palpable when an adult Joel becomes his child self, both witness and participant to his memory dissolving, pulling his flailing body down a sink drain.

Joel runs down the maze-like corridors of his mind, holding onto the Clementine who really represents only his idealized, subjective projection of who she is. But when he emerges, he's willing, despite everything he knows about how badly it will most probably go with the real Clementine, to give their life together another chance.

About that ending: no sappy-happy ride off into the sunset, here. And I often quote the last lines of the movie in screenwriting classes as an example of how much great dialogue can pack into the simplest of mundane phrases. Right at the painful point of acknowledging how everything in their shared experiences indicates that their reunion may be destined to fail, Joel decides to take that risk. "Okay," he says. "Okay," Clementine responds. Those four syllables moved me to tears the first time I saw the film... as they have every time I've seen it since.

This 10th anniversary post from The Film Stage is chockful of delightful photos from ESOTSM's shoot. Many interesting links are available on the Wiki page. The Oscar-winning screenplay is available here. Interviews with Kaufman and a clip of his Oscar speech can be found on this site. And there's an interview with director Gondry here.

But really, the best celebration I can think of is to view the movie again, if you haven't seen it since its original run. Within all of Sunshine's trippiness and weirdosity lies a romantic relationship whose dark truths feel a lot closer to those lived in the modern world than what's usually seen in your average rom-com. And for that I'm eternally grateful.

Fosse

If you’re looking for a holiday gift for someone in The Industry – and by that I mean anyone working in movies, television, theater, even in dance or the music business – the new biography Fosse by Sam Wasson has got you covered. 

Bob Fosse, you may remember, is the only man to have won the show business trifecta: an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy in one year (1972). But did it make him happy? Therein lies the tale, or at least, the core of it.

Fosse is a big, fat book that may look intimidating (the text is nearly 600 pages, pre-notes and acknowledgements), but it’s such an engrossing page-turner of a read that I’m not alone in thinking that it could’ve been longer. Reviews have been raves, and the book’s already an Amazon bestseller.

Author Wasson is a friend, but with this definitive bio out now, and the NY Times bestseller Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (about the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s) behind him, he hardly needs any smoke-blowing promotion from me.  And I would’ve eaten this book up with a spoon, regardless.

What Sam has pulled off here is no small feat. Due to his prodigious research and insights, you feel that you are there, fly-on-the-wall style, for all the events that transpire in Fosse’s life, and you feel like you’re getting the real deal – that you’re in Fosse’s head or, at least, that you’re with the man as he actually was, brought to vivid life in all his neurotic glory.

In a recent NPR interview, well worth a listen, Sam relates one of the many great anecdotes that are in the book, about an encounter between Fosse and his close friend, the formidable screen and TV writer, Paddy Chayefsky (the "Gwen" Fosse refers to is his wife Gwen Verdon, and Nicole, their daughter):

Fosse [is] in the hospital having just had a heart attack, facing open-heart surgery the next morning - bypass surgery - he's sitting there with Paddy. Paddy's going over Fosse's will, which he has just rewritten. And Paddy, of course, reads every single word of every single page of the document, expecting to find himself in there. He realizes Fosse's left him out.

And Paddy looks up from the will and looks to Fosse and says: I'm not in here. I'm your best friend of 10 years; where am I? And Fosse says: Well, Paddy, I don't worry about you. You're going to be fine. I wanted to make sure Gwen was OK, and Nicole was OK... I wanted to provide for my family. I don't worry about you. You know I love you. I got to provide for these other people. And Paddy looks up and says: Fuck you, live.

So that gives you a flavor of what these guys were. And Fosse laughs so hard and… all the tubes are plugged into his nose and the heart machine starts beeping and - I mean, it was a constant party in Fosse's room.

 

Yes, there was a lot of laughter, but Fosse also makes it clear that a deep well of fear, anger, and pain lay behind the singular icon’s great achievements. The book chronicles how this infamously driven workaholic sought to deal with his demons, and it serves as a kind of cautionary tale for all of us creative types who seek to somehow keep our work and our personal lives in balance. In an e-mail exchange with Sam, the biographer had this to say about his subject:

It's a book about the problems of insecurity [and] the vulnerability that comes from being an artist. One of the things I love about Fosse is that he endured an amplified version of the problems we in the creative realm deal with, namely, "How do I make it better? Can I make it better? Why is it never enough? Why am I never enough? What's wrong with me?" The fear of creation. Not fear: the panic. For me it is always there. And so I'm very moved by Fosse's story... I hope people read it as being bigger than Fosse.

It felt that way to me, and I think anyone who delves into this addictively readable book will come away with some big-sized thoughts to ponder, as well as an interest in re-experiencing the handful of great movies that Fosse’s panic, and talent, produced.

[Sam Wasson will be signing copies of Fosse this Friday night (12/6) at the Aero Theater, as well as helming a panel in conjunction with showings of Cabaret and All That Jazz – details in this link.]

 

The Art of Higher Stakes

Most people I know who haven't yet seen Amour approach it as if it's cinematic spinach: they don't really want to see it, but they know they should, because supposedly it's good for you. What fascinates me is the inevitable turnaround. Without exception, everyone I know who dreaded seeing Amour has become a rabid cheerleader for seeing the movie, after the fact.

If you have seen Amour, you know the reasons why. Arguably a masterpiece, inarguably emotionally devastating, it's a willfully perverse piece of work, almost an anti-entertainment that's nonetheless totally riveting, even in the moments when it tempts you to run screaming from the screen.

Much fun has been made of our current crop of Oscar contenders in terms of their, how shall we say... certain lack of joie de vivre? You've got your bloody slave's revenge movie, your waterboarding terrorists movie, the one with the hostages, the one with the kid held hostage by a tiger, the civil war movie, the poverty-stricken motherlesss child movie, the bipolar loves clinically depressed love story, and of course the cheery Let's See Who Gets Out of This Alive musical that's actually called The Miserables (or The Wretched, depending on your translator).

Amour, in its quiet way, trumps them all, by telling the simple, tragic story of an elderly man forced to watch his beloved wife slowly disintegrate and die. Nobody's idea of a good time, yet the members of the Academy have seen fit to nominate Amour for best picture, actress, director, and original screenplay (as well as best foreign film). 

I get it, and I'll even wager that in the historical long view, Amour's the one in the bunch that will loom larger than the rest. And while I doubt the movie will win any of the major awards it's up for (while its fifth nom, for Best Foreign Movie, looks like a lock), I think any screenwriter interested in the craft ought to give it some carefully considered study.

There's a syndrome I've encountered in both pre-pro and professional screenwriting circles that affects many a talented writer, which I'll call I'm Too Smart For That (ITS for short). You read a draft, and you find it so devoid of strongly emotional beats and big dramatic moments - at least, as articulated on the page - that it makes your typical Eric Rohmer film seem like The Avengers. Question the writer, and you learn that they have an abhorrence of the melodramatic, the cheap trick, and all the other ploys of the prototypical Big Commercial Movie. The writer has better taste, better instincts, worthier goals: He's too smart for that.

The ITS writer has fallen into a common confusion, in mistaking a plot (with strong story development that creates excitement in the reader) and compelling characters (with emotional inner lives the reader can access and relate to) for a script that will be accused of being over the top or on the nose. What often takes the place of such plot and characterization in an ITS script is anecdote, quirkiness, lyricism, mood, color, philosophy... in other words, everything that can make for a cinematic meal but the main course. Such a movie, should it ever get made, will rarely be watched.

The wonderful thing about being artful (or indie), in this regard, is that you can get away with it, and Amour is a fantastic testament to this fact, for one simple reason: it has real stakes. And they're spectacular.

A writer friend of mine once said that a story is only as good as its stakes; another way to say it is that a story is only as involving as its conflict is important. The stakes in Amour are as high as they come: this is literally a matter of life and death. What's worse (for the characters, that is, while it's great for the screenwriter) is that the antagonist has the upper hand, and cannot be defeated. Memento mori.

Time is the terrible villain of Amour, and in a very real sense, almost every scene in Michael Haneke's elegantly wrought script pits its protagonists, and by extension, its audience, against time. For this reason, there are a few shots in the film that go on for so long, for no immediately obvious reason, that they test the viewer's endurance. But endurance, too, is the subject matter at hand. What's really being studied is in fact the stubborn endurance of compassion in the face of inexorable indifference, or what we generally call "death."

Not to belabor my simple point: we forgive Amour its excesses - its longeurs, pauses, ellipses, its ceaseless preoccupation with the kind of quotidian details that most movies avoid like plague - because its life-or-death stakes underscore every shot. It's because the characters masterfully played by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant have earned our empathy that we bear with their struggle, as painful as it inevitably becomes. And it's because the tension in the story is so basic, so primal, that we willingly hang in there, to see what kind of resolution could possibly give this couple, and ourselves, a cathartic release.

Amour is an object screenwriting lesson in how high stakes can allow a writer to give full rein to his or her imaginative capacities. For nearly its entirety, the movie never leaves one apartment, fer chrissake, and yet it's being celebrated as one of the great movies of our time. So having lives at stake is apparently something to bear in mind when you're constructing your story. I'm Too Smart For That writers, take note.

Me or Us?

We're in that season now.  Some think of it as the holidays, and others, as the six week stretch when most of the year's decent movies finally come out (i.e. Oscar contender time).  In fact, so many movies worth seeing come out at once, that people who write about movies tend to bunch a bunch of them together in their reviews, and in some cases, develop Deep Thoughts about what these movies do or don't have in common.

Guilty as self-charged.  I recently saw three movies, two with a lock on Best Actor nominations and a third dark horse, all of them featuring compelling male protagonists: Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, Denzel Washington as pilot Whip Whitacker (Flight), and Richard Gere as hedge fund magnate Robert Miller (Arbitrage).  What struck me was how all three movies focused on a moral dilemma which, however timeless, seems particularly timely in our current historical moment.

In Arbitrage, the Gere character has embezzled funds, ostensibly to save his company, his family, and his wealthy lifestyle.  The tension in the story arises from what happens when he commits another crime that threatens to expose the first.

Flight is about how airliner pilot Denzel heroically turns what could have been a total crash disaster into much less of one, saving most of the lives (referred to in the movie, tellingly, as "souls") onboard.  Problem is, Denzel is an alcoholic who happened to be drunk at the time.

Lincoln focuses on a key moment in this beloved historical figure's life: his fight to get the 13th amendment, constitutionally abolishing slavery, passed - which may involve his having to keep the Civil War going, as opposed to ending it.

At their cores, each of these movies hinges on the same particular conflict, which could simply be stated as: Me or them?

Arbitrage's Gere, in ways too spoiler to elucidate, ends up having to choose between owning up to what he's done, or selling someone close to him down the river.  In truth, while he claims company and family as his rationale, his dilemma is really about maintaining his own power.

The alcoholism of Denzel in Flight creates a similar dichotomy: obviously Whip's disease threatens the lives of everyone he encounters on his job, and ultimately he, too, finds that his only way out of what could be a hefty prison sentence is to sell out someone near and dear.

Lincoln is a bit of a special case.  As President, the "them" Lincoln is dealing with is the nation he's been chosen to lead.  Nonetheless, he's ultimately faced with either compromising his own beliefs and principles in order to serve "their" immediate needs (i.e. by ending the bloodshed), or answering to what he believes is, besides his own legacy, the higher call of history.

The pattern's obvious, but it struck me that, in the context of our recent election and its consequences, this particular conflict - caring about the betterment of others vs. what's best for oneself - is with us now, more than ever.  It framed the philosophies behind the presidential race's politics, and it's the framework of where we are in the current tax dispute.  Are we willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, or is it going to be every man for himself?

Most of us aren't millionaire financial execs, ace airline pilots, or Daniel Day Lewis (he is Lincoln now, don't you know).  But this particular struggle - which we could more accurately define as "me or us?" - is apparently really saying hello to the audience now, even in what's usually our hallowed hall of escapism.  

Maybe I'm only reaching, and pissing on my head, as an old musician friend used to put it, so I'm curious to hear from those of you who've seen some of the other high profile end-of-2012 releases.  Is this focus actually a trend?  Living RomCom wants to know.

American Woman

It is a recognized phenomenon that anywhere from a few months to a year after an Oscars presentation, you can't remember what movie or director won.

This will not be true for 2010.

"There is no other way to describe this. It's the moment of a lifetime. First of all -- this is so extraordinary to be in the company of such powerful -- my fellow nominees -- such powerful film makers who have inspired me and I have admired for -- some of whom -- for decades. Thank you to every member of the Academy. This is again the moment of a lifetime."

It was so immensely satisfying to see Kathryn Bigelow win her award, and realize that history and symbolism notwithstanding, her being a woman was also incidental.  She was being acknowledged for a job well done.  The honor was just.

This year's Academy Awards were unusual as well for being, despite the weak start and the bloated length, such enjoyable cultural comfort food.  At a time when our country rarely does any one thing together - our communally watching a live show in real time has become, outside of sports on TV, an odd, almost retro event - the Oscars fulfilled a kind of American ideal. 

A good guy won, and spent his speech time essentially thanking his mom and dad (The Dude abides); our best actress was as smack-dab-in-the-center American in persona as a gal can be.  Mo'Nique, embodying the American dream sensibility endemic to the event, addressed her husband ("Thank you for showing me that sometimes you have to forego doing what's popular in order to do what's right.  And baby, you were so right.")  Sandra Bullock homaged her mom with a similar bent: "She said... There’s no race, no religion, no class system, no color, nothing, no sexual orientation that makes us better than anyone else. We are all deserving of love."

When Barbra Streisand introduced Kathryn Bigelow's win with, "Well, the time has come," it was hard to be a cynic.  It felt un-conflictedly good, for once, to be us.  The David v. Goliath victory of The Hurt Locker over Avatar - celebrated in the wake of so many unsuccessful movies about a war we didn't want to go to the movies to see - became an embrace of what we Americans like to feel is best in us.  

"... I'd like to dedicate this to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world and may they come home safe.  Thank you," Bigelow ended her Best Director speech. 

Ms. Bullock's wind-up was funnier ("I thank you so much for this opportunity that I share with these extraordinary women and my lover Meryl Streep”).  But the close of Bigelow's acceptance for Best Picture drove the theme home:

"Perhaps one more dedication. To men and women all over the world who — sorry to reiterate — but wear a uniform, not just the military — HazMat, emergency, firemen. They are there for us, and we are there for them."

For a couple of minutes there, you felt - and how strange to experience it while peering into the belly of the show biz beast! - that this was true. 

Evidently the Academy, once in a while, can actually get it right. 

Give 'Em the Goldurned Statuette

Assuming there are thousands of other blogs discussing Avatar today, the movie and the money and the whole zeitgeist of it all, I feel pretty comfortable offering you a bit of counter-programming.  I just saw a little movie - teensy in the shadow of James Cameron's juggernaut - which, if there is any justice left in the world, ought to earn at least one Oscar in the new year.

How much do I love thee, Jeff Bridges?  Let me count the movies that would make up my personal pantheon of favorites when it comes to the guy who may well be my favorite American actor: Starman (1984), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Fisher King (1991), Fearless (1993), The Big Lebowski (1998) and now Crazy Heart (2009).  

He's great, of course, in the movie that introduced him to most of us - 1971's The Last Picture Show, and I developed my man-crush on Bridges in the now-overlooked Hearts of the West (1975) - perhaps because he was playing an idealistic aspiring screenwriter who comes of age in cynical Hollywood (identify much, young Bill?).

A glance at the filmography suggests that although Bridges is up for an Oscar for playing a guy named Bad, he's rarely, if ever, been anything but good - even when stuck in middling mainstream melodrama (e.g. Against All Odds, 1984), ahead-of-its-time genre weirdness (Tron, 1982) or too dark for the room misfires (The Vanishing, 1993). 

Though he's been perfectly believable as both an American president (2000's The Contender), and a nefarious comic book villain (Iron Man, 2008), Bridges has long been seemingly most well-suited to playing shaggy-haired underdog misfits (e.g. 1972's Fat City, 1981's Cutter's Bone).  But he's also done the romantic leading man thing many times over, even holding his own with Jane Fonda (The Morning After, 1986) and Streisand (The Mirror Has Two Faces, 1996). 

Perhaps what's contributed to Bridge's versatility in this regard is his cool but oddly amenable reserve.  He's removed - one step back behind those shrewd but kindly eyes.  He's both present (in a palpably vulnerable way), and hidden (figuring out the angles of whatever defensive edifice his character is trying to construct).  His feelings are visible, but you're conscious of the effort he's putting into trying to keep them to himself.

 

Up until now I'd have agreed with popular consensus that The Iconic Jeff Bridges Role would be Lebowski.  But go see Crazy Heart (this is, after all, the point of my meandering valentine) and see if you don't agree: as Bad Blake, a nearly washed-up, literally and metaphorically wasted country western singer, Bridges has never been better. 

That Bridges fits so well into the worn blue jeans of Bad is due in part to the exemplary efforts of one great musical team: T-Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton wrote the songs for him.  Sadly, Bruton - for years Kris Kristofferson's guitarist - died recently, but this makes quite a swan song. 

Many movies have attempted to make credible, memorable singer-songwriter characters come to life on the screen, but Crazy Heart delivers the goods: you believe these are hit songs, you believe Bad Blake wrote them, and well before the closing credits, you want to buy the soundtrack: these aren't throw-away faux-numbers, they're great tunes, period.

It helps that Bridges can sing (you can hear some of his own compositions on his website).  Helps that the lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal plays opposite, and it surely helps that newbie director Scott Cooper (who also wrote the adaptation of Thomas Cobb's novel) has done such a fine job with such predictable material.  

Make no mistake, this is an old, familiar story - you've seen it before, and in the case of supporting actor Robert Duvall, you've even seen it with that guy in it (Duvall essentially played the Bridges part in Horton Foote's Tender Mercies in 1983).  But Cooper has added surprising notes and undertones to an old wine to make it memorable.

Avatar will be bursting off its 3-D screen for months to come, and you'll have your pick of theaters (and dimensions) to see it in.  Crazy Heart may soon disappear, and be harder to find, so you might want to seek it out.  And those Academy voters ought to put that gold thinger into the hand where it's long belonged.