Bridget Jones Interviews Colin Firth

According to my dashboard, that last bit of trifling nonsense, whatever it was, was my 500th post. To celebrate, and because I've got Bridget on the brain, here is this super meta scene from the "deleted scenes" of the second film, Edge of Reason (even funnier in the book). I think it sums up a lot of facets of this blog.

A fun-filled week of contemporary P+P updates

It's funny how ubiquitous P+P is in pop culture... this week I caught two of my fave recent flicks, both of which are adapations of that novel.

First was the Bollywood-Hollywood-rom-com-musical hybrid spectacular "Bride and Prejudice"... I've never talked about this film at length here, but I have to say for a moment just how much I love it. It updates the P&P storyline with some interesting cultural and economic twists, and Aishwarya Rai is just a total winner as Latika/Lizzy, and I love the goofy, spirited, whirling musical numbers, the gorgeous filmmaking, and all the secondary characters. Here's the opening musical number:



(Sorry for the teeny-tininess)

[On a sidenote, I'm fascinated by female-directed, female-centric films like this and Mama Mia that have such an unself-conscious joie de vivre. They're so different from almost all other films (and misunderstood by critics). It's funny that both were such giant hits in the UK and less so here, though neither flopped]

Perennially-beloved contemporary P+P (and Tom Jones) adaptation "Bridget Jones's Diary" (which I've written about before) happened to be on tV for the umpteenth time this weekend. Though the film is not as good as the book, it's still the last great Rom-Com to grace our screens. With the exception of "Music and Lyrics," there hasn't been a decent addition to the genre in years. It has a non-stick-thin, non chirpy heroine, which makes me particularly happy (and all though much of the humor is at her expense, she has her share of fantastic zingers). And I love all the P+P in-references, particularly when Bridget tells Darcy "you need to seriously reconsider the length of your sideburns."

Here's a funny scene from the first one:

"Knocked Up" Knocks Women

I'm sorry, Apatow-loving feminists, you almost swayed me, but not quite. The movie is pretty sexist. Sexist and funny, like most comedies out there, sure. But to say that Apatow's brilliant directing masks the misogynist undertones of the film is giving him way too much credit. The last scene of the movie features a guy looking at his daughter and telling her that NOT WEARING A CONDOM WAS THE BEST DECISION HE EVER MADE. On that alone, the movie is seriously problematic.

But let's rewind and I will try to discuss the movie rationally and methodically, to thwart my destiny as a the HYSTERICAL WALKING UTERUS that Apatow seems to think I am.

[I saw the movie last night with my honey, incidentally, because we were both interested by all the chatter and wanted to weigh in. Although the trailers bugged me, I kept an open mind . I am always ready to laugh, period. So if I had found the movie redeeming, I'd say so. If I found it offensive but hilarious enough to be redeeming, I'd say so. I found its humor and its offensiveness at cross-purposes though.]

1) Smash-mortion:
Besides the "not wearing a condom was the best thing I ever did" line, the most egregiously offensive scene was when Heigl's character consulted with her mom about whether or not to "take care of it." This is where the movie lost me. The mom was presented as a castrating bitchTM who callously told her daughter that she only had one choice, and that the baby would be a nuisance--so the allegedly pro-choice person is actually anti-choice. When she described a family member who had an abortion and then had a "real baby" years later, the detached way she spoke made members of my audience audibly gasp. They were gasping at the cruelty of the pro-abortion position. Thanks Judd!

But guess who gets to be pro-baby in the film? The guy's sympathetic pothead dad. Talk about a male fantasy.

2) Uppity bitches

Why do the slackers who have all the fun and make the good jokes get to be guys (or one ugly girl)? This really annoyed me. I guess some women liked the film because they identified with the perfectly groomed, family-loving careerist femme-power duo of Heigl and Leslie Mann, but I for one would have felt more at home with the freaks and their bong.

Sucks for me. Apatow painted that world like some inner sanctum of male privilege. The guys got to make all the hilarious pop culture references. The guys got to live communally. When Heigl and Mann are together they talk not about movies or music, but about 1)men 2) how old and fat they are.

When I lived with women in college, we spent a lot of time passing a bong around and making pop culture references. The only part of Seth Rogen's lifestyle Heigl embraces is the porn, though (god, Apatow fucking loves porn).

The "comedy acting" embodied by the women of this and most contemporary comedies is all about shrillness and hysteria.

Where are the Truth About Cats and Dogs plots, or where are the silly heroines from movies like Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion and Bridget Jones? When do we get to be goofy and lovable? Never, in Apatow's world.

3)Take care of me!

"Knocked Up" is all about the man's responsibility to "take care" of the woman and child. Why would Katherine Heigl, a successful woman, want to be in a relationship with Seth Rogen? Why wouldn't she just want to raise the child as friends? Cause she need a man, silly. Cause in Apatow's words, she wants to "do the right thing!" HUH?

Why does Leslie Mann's character (another castrating bitch TM ) love Paul Rudd's character so much? Why are we still treading these re-hashed stereotypes?

Also, why don't the women get to be ambivalent about kids? Heigl doesn't want to be pregnant but as soon as she really knows she is, she stops crying and embraces mommydom. Mann is obsessed with being a good mom and chides her hubby for not being an equally good parent--her only concern with her existence as a mom is not being hot anymore.

4. Women-parts are scary

Why does Heigl's pregnancy make her go so crazy? The hormones from her lady-organs.
Why won't Seth Rogen have sex with her? Cause he's scared of her fetus-filled uterus.
Why won't she have sex with him? Cause the bump makes her look fat.
What's the scariest thing Rogens' friend sees? A baby popping out.
What's the insult all the boyz use? Vagina.
I don't think it's ironic, incidentally, that they use that word repeatedly. I think Apatow is trying to be ironic, but I really think he fears the nether-regions.

There's so much else to talk about (or ask endless open-ended questions about) with this movie, but I'm totally exhausted. I didn't think Knocked Up was a knowing in-joke. I thought it was a save-the-children screed that totally ignored the perspective of women.

For more, see here and here and the comments on my last post here.

Ooh, and here's another one.

JONESing for some Joneses....

On Friday night, while resting in preparation for my full day of teaching (yep that's right, I work on the [Jewish] Lord's day) my bf and I were flipping back and forth between two Joneses and two Fieldings. The first Jones was Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, a somewhat piss-poor adaptation of a riotously witty book by Helen Fielding, and the second is the classic adaptation of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, one of the first bildungsomans ever published in the English lingo.

Now fellow-ette's not so hip to the world of the 18th century novel. All she's read are Evelina, Crusoe, and a bunch of potboilers by Eliza Haywood, Aphra Behn, and Anne Radcliffe thanks to her awesome "Women and the Novel" class--taught by a wonderful female prof who naturally did not get tenure at Harvard. But I know enough about the turgid old 18th century to know that sex and ribaldry were far from off-topic in the pre-victorian era, and that as a result of this no-taboo age, the Tom Jones movie, if not particularly suck-you-in fascinating, is kind of hilarious. Like, 18th century breeches and low-cut blouse rolling in the hay/falling into ponds hilarious.

And the very necessary comparison between Bridge and Tom was all the more brilliantly illuminated by watching snatches of both movies back to back. Here's the thing; people dismiss Bridget Jones as chick-lit, and in some ways it did usher in that era. But the novels, light-hearted as they are, are so much more than the ro-co-standard movies, despite the good acting, can illustrate. First of all, there's the importance of the literary allusions. There's Tom Jones, there's Austen everywhere, and knowing your British literature will make you appreciate Bridget's adventures all the more.

Second of all, getting rid of Bridget's voice-over narration in the second film takes away the most vital part of the books: namely Bridget's "diary," which is witty, knowing, and a lot stronger than multiple screen shots of the wobbling, tottering, idiot Renee Zellweger would have us believe.

So in conclusion:

1. Helen Fielding is a sly genius whose books are much cleverer than the screen can convey.
2. Tom Jones (not the singer, the character) is a rakish but well-meaning sex panther.
3. Don't knock [chick l]it till you've tried [chick l]it
4. Because it may be something more.

Holiday! Celebrate!

We eagerly went to the Nancy Meyer's-directed chick-flick/Ro-Co on opening weekend, to give a hearty "fuck you" to Apocalypto among other reasons. The movie was super-adorable, incredibly romantic and easy on the eye, but the relentless focus on eye-candy couple Cameron Diaz and Jude Law at the expense of Kate Winslet and Jack Black's much more interesting, combustible, believable pair was really disappointing. I think it must have happened in the cutting room, because surely anyone more interested in charisma and freshness than in box-office numbers wouldn't have let the movie be so lopsided.

It's not that the Law/Diaz romance didn't have its charms, because their overly dysfuctional courtship was cute and sweet at moments. But it was a let-down for those of us excited to see Kate in her first contemporary comedy and Jack sporting his more serious side that so much valuable screen time was wasted just watching the two more chiseled, somewhat vapid blondes moon over each other. And both Diaz and Law are so traditionally good-looking and were so impeccably groomed (a characteristic of Nancy Meyers' movies-- does she ever portray shlumpy women who aren't super-neat and put together?) that their romance belongs in fantasyland. The slower, more self-effacing and bumbling characters that Winslet and Black embodied so well were magnetic, interesting, and new. So of course, they were sacrificed. The meta-ironic part of it all is that Eli Wallach's character, an aging screenwriter, rails against the way box office results and money dictate severything in Hollywood these days. So it would seem!

At the risk of repeating myself, the England-America house-swapping/self-finding trope was much better done by Maeve Binchy in the lovely novel Tara Road. It was made into a movie with Andie MacDowell that I now am eager to Netflix for comparison's sake. I imagine I'll find it more genuine. Nonetheless, it bugs me that the critics are always eager to pounce on female directors for pandering to female audiences with pleasurably gift-wrapped romances, yet they're willing to praise a Michael Mann or a Mel Gibson for laying on the gore and guns and even call them auteurs or visionaries. It's amazing how much of our conception of high-taste is still determined by gender stereotypes.

PS. Speaking of gender stereotypes, Rufus Sewell's turn as a cad of the caddiest sort justifies my putting him on my hunkiest actors in period-dramas list. He almost upstages Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones playing the same role-- and Kate Winslet would have made a much better Bridget as well. How about Bridget Jones, the remake, with Sewell, Winslet, and Jack Black-- and not a ditzy blonde in sight?