February is the perfect month for romantic comedy consumption, so I watched as many as humanly possible. They varied substantially in quality. Below are three of the most memorable –– one is great, one is middling (and, admittedly, not quite a romantic comedy), and one is downright awful.
One Fine Day
This is the Uncut Gems of romantic comedies: over the course of a day, two struggling single parents must endure a relentless New York City pace to save their jobs and their kids, and almost everything that can go wrong does go wrong. In addition to boasting natural character arcs and witty dialogue, the near-perfect screenplay provides masterful logistical support — each tiny detail blossoms into an important plot point, and every wild event has enough build-up and rationale to feel completely believable.
Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney have pretty great romantic chemistry, but the real focuses are the parent-child relationships. Sammy Parker and Mae Whitman give amazing performances that make their characters seem like real kids, which is vital to the success of the movie, as they’re simultaneously antagonists, wing-men, and the MacGuffins that drive the story. Their wonderful chemistry with both adult protagonists makes the entire movie work — and the constant hell that they put their parents through should make this required viewing for anyone who wants to have kids.
Morning Glory
Despite poorly written characters and a wonky plot, Morning Glory finds solid success as a movie about the tension between serious art and light entertainment, ultimately concluding that there’s room for both to coexist and inform one another. It’s rare to see a movie that seems so adamantly about itself.
Although it uses goofy morning news television as its backdrop, Morning Glory decidedly feels like a movie about making movies. From the director of Notting Hill and the writer of The Devil Wears Prada comes the story of an aspirational creator who wants to make the best comfort entertainment in the business. The main character is a bushy-tailed optimist who takes her work incredibly seriously — even though few in the industry actually respect it — because she knows it’ll reach a wide audience of people who need a little joy. Rachel McAdams has a nearly-impossible task — to make trashy news programming seem not only worthwhile, but downright aspirational — and miraculously succeeds.
She’s up against a perfectly-cast Harrison Ford, playing a legendary has-been who grumpily accepts his fate as he transitions from serious work to lighter fare. Although the character’s motivation doesn’t quite progress as well as the movie thinks it does, the actor still knocks it out of the park, because observing his presence here is essentially just watching actor Harrison Ford come to terms with the fact that he’s in a movie like Morning Glory. He represents the old guard of respectable broadcasting that made audiences think; now, he must pivot to making them feel good. This movie is not tapping into Ford’s movie-star charisma, but instead the sheer magnetic joy of watching him grumpily dismiss his fans in interviews. He plays a diva with little patience and an absurdly inflated ego, especially considering the fluffiness of his work — doesn’t seem like much of a stretch!
The strange paradox of Harrison Ford is that he’s an actor who takes himself so seriously that he seems a little resentful of the lightness of his most popular roles, yet he continues to take parts in family-friendly blockbusters. I think that this unique internal tension is what makes him so compelling as a screen presence: he constantly acts like he’s above his material, which imbues it with a relaxed looseness because he doesn’t quite care about the quality of the finished product. But his continual presence in movies like this one suggests that somewhere inside his grumpy exterior, he loves having an avenue to relish his grumpiness — which is what makes him perfect for this movie.
How Do You Know
that a movie doesn’t work? Well, if it begins by introducing universally relatable conflicts like “getting cut from the USA Olympic softball team” and “being subpoenaed for fraud investigations in federal court,” it’s immediately on thin ice before the opening credits can finish. Although there are glimpses of muddled accessibility in Paul Rudd’s strained relationship with his father and in everyone’s constant self-pity, James L. Brooks’ final feature almost entirely lacks the ability to recreate normal human behavior and emotion. Every single facet of the movie is bizarre in its cold distance from reality. Movies, and romantic comedies in particular, shouldn’t necessarily strive for realism, but this one is so removed from real life that it makes Brooks’ own As Good As It Gets look like a nature documentary.
Everything about this film is so off-putting that it seems like either a series of intentional choices to unease its audience or a collection of bafflingly obvious mistakes. The story is poor and poorly told, yes, but it also fails on the most basic technical levels. Half of the line delivery sounds like the actors are reading off of cue cards — which may simply be an effect of unnatural dialogue as written in the script, or of incredibly weak direction — and character motivations nonsensically shift over the course of individual scenes.
The blocking seems like an afterthought, as the actors spend entire scenes sitting or standing in uncomfortable, unnatural positions with odd amounts of space between them, or occasionally walk throughout the distractingly-cluttered sets without making the scene feel more dynamic or coherent. Even a cinematographer as experienced as Janusz Kamiński cannot capture this awful blocking with effectiveness, let alone artistry — many shots look like they were cropped in post-production, which makes the compositions look awful, and people are bafflingly out of focus in several scenes for no particular reason.
If that’s not enough, the editing never establishes any sense of rhythm, instead disorienting the audience with oddly-timed cuts, and the pacing feels completely out of whack because scenes either end abruptly or last far too long. The whole project seems strangely amateurish, which makes no sense for a 120 million dollar movie from a team of experienced professionals. It’s one of the weirdest Hollywood productions I’ve ever encountered. I have a headache.
Other rom-com highlights: What If, Easy A, Just Like Heaven, Grosse Pointe Blank, Two Weeks Notice, Music and Lyrics, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Five-Year Engagement, They Came Together, Love and Basketball, But I’m a Cheerleader, and An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
Lowlights: Sweet Home Alabama, 27 Dresses, The Wedding Planner, America’s Sweethearts, Magic in the Moonlight, and Admission
And meh-lights: Date Night, The Proposal, The Sure Thing, and Failure to Launch
I also watched one of the greatest films of the 1930s…and one of the weirdest of the 1990s.
M
Fritz Lang establishes the serial killer procedural with more nuance and clarity than almost any story that follows in its footsteps. Where other crime thrillers tend to glamorize police and vilify perpetrators, M pointedly complicates our conceptions of both: the cops are simultaneously incompetent at doing their jobs and enemies of the public good, and the killer is a human victim of tragic circumstance, in desperate need of assistance in a world determined to withhold it.
M’s primary focus isn’t on either of these parties, though — instead, the majority of the film revolves around the townspeople as they attempt vigilante justice. At first, their quick mobilization seems like a testament to the power of collectivization and collaboration: in the face of an overreaching police state, civilians unite to do what the cops never could. Yet by the film’s end, the public devolves into (or reveals its true nature as) a monstrous mob, dead-set on imposing its twisted will by committing a crime of passion that’s barely distinguishable from those of its mentally-ill target. Every thread of the film demonstrates fear’s unparalleled ability to unite and reshape societies for the worse — over the course of the movie, it’s used as a means to exert force, invade privacy, and justify bitter violence.
Lang’s direction has never been clearer: he uses his German Expressionist roots to craft a shadowy world that matches the dark cynicism of the film’s themes, and elegantly captures it with mind-blowing cinematography. The film also makes perfect use of sound without ever overdoing it, unlike other early talkies, and the brisk editing makes almost every scene riveting. It’s a gripping thriller with a harsh, sobering vision of human nature.
Dick Tracy
An eye-popping, mouth-dropping work of campy excess, Dick Tracy succeeds as a comic adaptation because, aside from Burton’s Batman and Into the Spider-Verse, no movie has better captured the visual splendor of the source medium. The expansive sets and colorful costumes make watching the movie feel like you’re stepping into an endless bubblegum-noir theme park, trading any sense of reality for pop-art fantasy.
With one notable exception, the entire cast matches the elevated tone set by the surreal aesthetics. Al Pacino, caked in the most ridiculous makeup he’s ever worn (and yet among the least ridiculous makeup in the movie), goes completely bananas as the cartoonish gangster antagonist, while Madonna sings some solid Sondheim songs as the live-action equivalent of Jessica Rabbit. Basically every other supporting character is even more absurd than these two, as their identities are almost exclusively reduced to their most obvious trait, like gangster versions of the seven dwarfs — character names include Lips, Little Face, Itchy, the Brow, and Flattop, and they’re even more preposterous than they sound.
The only problem: actor Warren Beatty is somehow not on the same wavelength as director Warren Beatty. Despite his ability to propel the entire production into bombastic camp territory, the multi-hyphenate fails to match the energy of the movie in his flat performance. He essentially plays the titular character as if he’s in a much more standard crime movie, and although he hits some of the comedic beats pretty well, his performance is way too natural for such a heightened film.
