2 posts tagged “movies”

Two things before I get to my point:

1) I don't usually condemn a movie without seeing it first. Like anyone, I have my rules: any movie based on a character from Saturday Night Live is most likely going to suck; ditto any Rob Schneider movies; and I'm going to hate all Tom Cruise movies, even if they don't suck. He ruins good stories in order to feed his enormous ego. (Given the chance to play Jesus, he'd be at The Last Supper by himself. Because he always works alone.) But previews can be misleading. What seems like a silly comedy turns out to be a movie about death, love and family dysfunction, e.g., Little Miss Sunshine; a movie marketed as a chick flick is actually a guy's movie - Beautiful Girls; a movie that should be awesome is really a piece of crap - Wonder Boys.

2) I say seriously and with no shame that I love good chick flicks. What qualifies as good is subjective, certainly. Movies about lost love just kill me. I've cried my eyes out at every viewing of The Way We Were and Splendor in the Grass. Edward Scissorhands upset me so much I don't think I can ever watch it again. But I still loved it. I'm also a sucker for love triumphing over class differences - Dirty Dancing is a favorite. It has everything a girl could want in a movie - Patrick Swayze. Jennifer Grey before the nose job. Creepy frat boy getting his comeuppance. Kelly Bishop. Sex. An illegal abortion. Dancing! And, my God, Jerry Orbach!

There are a ton of sub-genres within "chick flick", and "girls being shitty to each other" is one of them. I know girls can treat each other like crap sometimes. But the very premise of Bride Wars offends me to no end.

I've been seeing previews for the movie lately, and "you have to be kidding me" was my first reaction. But I thought that the girls were strangers fighting over wedding dresses and who gets the best caterer in town. Then I saw this preview, and got the full story. They're lifelong best friends. They're each others maids of honor. Then a mix-up occurs! And hijinks ensue! Kate Hudson tells Anne Hathaway her "wedding can suck it." Anne retaliates by attacking Kate while she's walking down the aisle.

The hilarity must be endless, I'm telling you right now. Look, I've been divided about weddings for a long time. I love them, but they bring out the worst in people. The only brides-to-be who don't want to lock their mothers in a closet are the ones who don't have a mother. I was ready to lock up both my mother and my future mother-in-law, and not let them out until after the wedding. The stress of planning a wedding can make anyone lose perspective.

But there's something that seems so completely distasteful about Bride Wars. It feeds on the idea that women are desperate to get married; that a wedding is the most important day of a woman's life; that all women have been planning their weddings since they were six years old; that women are, at heart, enemies of one another; that the wedding is more important than the marriage - so important, in fact, that no expense is too much. Even the expense of a lifelong friendship.

I know. It's just a movie, and a piece of fluff comedy at that. Comedy, after all, is often about the weaknesses and general dopiness of humans. Beneath all the funny is the truth of how people reconcile their idiocy with their desire to be good and loving to the people who matter to them. It's possible that Bride Wars is actually funny, because anything is possible. But, having seen only the preview, I can't get rid of the bad feeling I have about this movie being made in 2008, more than 40 years after the beginning of the second wave of feminism. I assume that Hudson's and Hathaway's characters are supposed to smart, talented, educated young women, maybe even professionally successful and ambitious. So why are they behaving like jealous, mean spirited harpies?

I have no doubt that Bride Wars will have an absolutely shocking ending, in which Anne and Kate realize the errors of their ways, and tearfully make up, swearing to never let anything come between them again. But you know what? Once you've told your best friend that she has a big ass, you can't ever take that back. I'll never know for sure if Bride Wars is as bad as I think it is, because I won't be spending either the time or the money to see it.

I don't know if it's because I'm a masochist or a hopeless idealist, or if I just wanted to make JP happy, but as of last Sunday, I've seen 2001 five times, each time thinking this will be when I learn to love it, or understand it, or care about it, or at least appreciate it. I left the theater kind of being able to appreciate it. I told JP I can understand why people love it. He took that as a victory. So there's that.
I understand that it wasn't really Keir Dullea who was dying in 2001, it was mankind. So I can accept that there wouldn't be a fast deathbed scene. But holy crap, Greta Garbo never took that long to die.
Or maybe it's not about the death of mankind, in which case it really did take Dullea too long to die. Maybe it's about reincarnation, and the soul, and God, and how you only see him at birth and death. But is God really just a cold block of stone? Shouldn't s/he be more cuddly during the two most traumatic times of your life?
I can't deconstruct this movie. Symbolism and metaphor are usually lost on me. I'm not Pauline Kael, who could have turned The Wedding Singer into something profound and meaningful.
I suppose someone could counter that the fact that I'm still thinking about it means Kubrick did his job. But I don't want to think about it anymore.
Because I just hate that fucking movie. It's overrated and it bores me almost to tears. I fell asleep at least three times on Sunday. The set-up, after the opening monkey/birth of man scene, is too long and full of scenes that don't matter or  have much of anything to do with the rest of the story. JP says Kubrick was trying to show that everything involves a certain amount of banality and tedium. I know that. There is no such thing as a glamorous job. But showing it on screen shouldn't be tediously torturous for the audience. I get it. The movie covers millions of years. But did the entire movie have to feel like it lasted millions of years?

There's a part of me that still thinks, after 35 years, that this was Kubrick's goof on the public. "Let's see if I can get them to take this seriously".
Its reputation as a stoner movie doesn't help. Like Fantasia (the movie, not the singer), 2001 has a cadre of fans who are always compelled to say "2001 is better if you're stoned." I doubt that was Kubrick's goal. At any rate, dude, it gives me a damned headache.