Project Valentine, Day 7: Harold and Maude

Today I watched Harold and Maude, and learned that Manic Pixie Dream Girls never really grow out of it.

You know when you were in college, and a bunch of friends would be sitting around late into the night talking about whatever, and the topic would eventually come around to movies?  And then, because you were in college and thought that settling questions like this made you seem deep, you all talked about the MOVIES THAT HAD CHANGED YOUR LIFE, and without fail somebody would mention H&M - usually the spacy chick who people put up with because she was hot, or else the poser guy who probably was only trying to score with the spacy chick.  But the thing is, spacy chick and poser guy aren't alone - the AFI falls all over itself to add this movie to practically every list they release.  To date, it has been listed on:

• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs (#45)
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions (#69)
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers (#89)
• AFI's 10 Top 10 Romantic Comedies (#9)

Harold is a death-obsessed guy in his 20s who tries to get his mother's attention with elaborately staged suicides.  He drives a hearse.  He attends funerals for fun.  It is at one of these funerals that he meets the 79 year-old Maude and begins a friendship with her.  If you've read the plot summary of even one MPDG film, you know the rest by now - she teaches him to love life and embrace its possibilities and fall in love and blah blah blah.

Yesterday, I mentioned that my problem with Garden State is that it doesn't earn its quirk.  To H&M's credit, it does earn the quirk.  All of its characters are kooky, but they inhabit a film world where they are not out of place.  If this had been a May-December romance set in that world, I may have even liked it.  But there are two big problems with Harold and Maude:  Harold and Maude.

I know that the point of a movie is not to make you love everybody in it, and that movies often ask you to identify with truly awful people.  Take one of my favorite movies of the last year, The Town.  Ben Affleck plays a bank robbing murderer, but you still want him to get away and get the girl.  The movie is honest about what he is.  Or my favorite TV show, Dexter.  He's a serial killer!  You still cheer when he foils attempts to bring him down, though.  The thing that makes these character work is that their shows are honest about what they are.  Where a movie loses me is when it presents a character doing lousy things but expects you just to write it off because it's cutesy.

Harold and Maude are two of the most selfish characters in any movie I have ever seen, but rather than being called out for it or experiencing any kind of growth past it, you're supposed to think it's just adorable, because she's old and tiny, and speaks in platitudes.  You know how they actually meet?  She steals his car, and then offers him a ride.  This is not a one-time occurrence.  Whenever Maude needs a ride, she steals whichever vehicle is closest at hand.  Her response when Harold mentions that this might not be the best thing to do: "Well, if some people get upset because they feel they have a hold on some things, I'm merely acting as a gentle reminder: here today, gone tomorrow, so don't get attached to things *now.* With *that* in mind, I'm not against collecting stuff."  In other words, it's OK for me to take your things, but don't touch my things. 

That's pretty much the pattern for her character; what she calls "embracing life" is what the rest of the world would call "being a selfish, obnoxious pain to everybody around you."  Somebody gives you a thoughtful gift?  Throw it in the ocean so that you'll "always know where it is!"  A cop asks for your driver's license?  Tell him you "don't believe in them!"  A person loves you and throws you a thoughtful birthday celebration to declare their love?  Kill yourself with an overdose of drugs because you feel like you've lived as long as you want to live!  Oops, I guess I spoiled the end.  Anyway, my point is this - sure, you're entitled to live life to the fullest, and even to do that by acting in the most self-centered way that you like.  What the writers and directors of MPDG movies expect us to believe again and again, though, is that somebody who does live that way will still be surrounded by people who instantly fall in love with them, and that just isn't the case.

Or as Roger Ebert puts it, "And so what we get, finally, is a movie of attitudes. Harold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life's hardly worth the extra bother."

I'm three movies into the Manic Pixie Dream Girls block, with just one left to go, and I'm definitely ready to move on to the next thing.  Watching this many in a row has given me a new revelation about MPDGs, though.  They are almost never a permanent fixture in the male romantic interest's life.  Once they have imparted their lessons, they either die or leave.  If they are in for the long haul, then they are a hothouse flower who must be treated as a precious and delicate thing.

RATING - One Jaguar hearse out of five.

LESSON - True love and commitment involves occasional self-sacrifice.  If a person tries to convince you that living life to the fullest means pursuing their own impulses regardless of your feelings, that person does not truly love you.

Project Valentine, Day 6: Garden State

I am seriously fighting off sleep in order to write this tonight, so we'll see how it goes.  The second movie in our Manic Pixie Dream Girls block is Garden State, the very movie that originally inspired the creation of the term MPDG.  I feel like I should tread carefully, because this is one of those movies that people seem to get really passionate about.  I'll sum up my judgment this way - it succeeds and it fails, both in glorious fashion.

Zach Braff plays an aspiring actor in LA who is called home to New Jersey when his mother dies.  His father, a psychiatrist, has kept him on a regimen of antidepressant drugs for most of his life, leaving him feeling detached and unhappy.  While he is home, he meets a girl (played by Natalie Portman) who makes him want to experience life again, and who he falls in love with.

That's a very quick, bare-bones outline of the plot, and as I mentioned, it both succeeds and fails.  First, the success.  I am blessed never to have experienced clinical depression, but have been very close to some individuals who have.  Several years ago, one of them showed up on my doorstep in tears one evening.  I asked him in, and as we talked, I learned that he was trying to go off of his medications after many years on them.  He knew that it was a dangerous move, but he said that he felt like he had spent the last decade of his life living behind a veil, never really experiencing anything, just watching somebody who he knew was him going through the motions of life.  Watching Zach Braff in this movie, that is exactly the feeling that is evoked, somebody who is trying very hard to reclaim the ability to feel.

Unfortunately, I think that the success in creating a mood comes at the expense of the story and dialogue, and that's where we get to the failure - Natalie Portman.  I don't like to say that, because I really like her and enjoy her work, but she is just unbearable in this movie.  You know what?  Here's a quote from one of the articles I linked yesterday that sums it up pretty well.

I hated that character from the second she flounced on the screen. I remember distinctly Portman telling Zach Braff's character that she was "weird" and then doing a silly little dance to illustrate her "weirdness." Honestly? Anyone who telegraphs their so-called weirdness so outlandishly is not actually weird, they're merely quirky enough to be vaguely interesting without having their own thing going on. They're completely mainstream but have one really big tattoo, or occasionally sing really loud in the shower! "Oh, Natalie," the A.V. Club writes, "your unconventional ways are so inspiring, and your beauty is surprisingly non-threatening!"

I know I'm in no position to denounce quirk - I love Wes Anderson's movies, for crying out loud.  The difference, though, is that in each of his films, he crafts an entire, carefully designed world that his characters' quirks are a natural part of.  We, the audience, know that the people we are watching are not normal, but in the world they live in, they make complete sense.  He earns the quirk.  Garden State does not earn the quirk.  You can't just take a girl, make her say ridiculous stuff like "This song'll change your life, I swear," to a perfect stranger, or "OK, so... so... sometimes I lie. I mean, I'm weird, man. About random stuff too, I don't even know why I do it. It's like... it's like a tick, I mean sometimes I hear myself say something and think, Wow, that wasn't even remotely true," and expect us to accept that she is a real part of anybody's world.  The only thing I can think of as a plus to her character is that if, like Braff's character, you were struggling to feel something again, it may be useful to have somebody around who annoys the shit out of you.

 

RATING - Clearly, we are supposed to love Portman's character, but even though I didn't, I still found parts of the movie to enjoy, particularly Peter Sarsgaard's performance.  I give it three LaughyBraffs out of five.

 

LESSON - Ah, I've got nothin' tonight.

Project Valentine, Day 5: (500) Days of Summer

Tonight we leave our block of classic romance movies, and enter our second block, devoted to that trickiest of romantic heroines: Manic Pixie Dream Girls.  Manic-what-now?  I'm glad you asked (although I did actually briefly talk about this once during Project Horror).

I can't take credit for the term MPDG.  Like many great things, it came from The Onion.  You can expand on this definition as needed (which they do in articles here, here, here, and here), but at her core the MPDG is "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."  You know, the girl who wants you to pull the car over so she can dance in the rain to the song that changed her life.  The girl who has lots of little quirks like wearing scarves in July or stealing apples from the corner grocer or giving names to stray dogs, and if you ask her about them she says some kind of mush about embracing life to the fullest.  That is the manic pixie dream girl.

I decided to lead off this block with (500) Days of Summer, a movie which I really knew nothing about except that two people whose opinions I respect (wassup, Matt and Scott?) strongly recommended it.  When I saw it listed in the Wikipedia article on MPDGs, I thought it would make a good starter.  Truthfully, though, although the female lead had some characteristics of an MPDG, this movie was so much more.

I LOVED this movie.  Really, it's very, very good.  I wouldn't have guessed this back when he was on 3rd Rock from the Sun, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt has grown into one of the most interesting young actors in Hollywood.  Between this and Inception, dude is on a roll.  I've seen Chloe Grace Moretz in three movies in the last year (this, Kick Ass, and Let Me In), and she has knocked my socks off each time.  Mark my words, she's almost 14 right now, but by the time she's 30 she'll have an Oscar.  She is a huge talent.  And I know that Zooey Deschanel isn't everybody's taste, but as far as I'm concerned, she's the perfect actress to play a woman who guys just fall in love with.

If I try to tell you the plot of (500) Days of Summer, it's not going to sound all that original.  A guy and a girl meet, and the rest of the movie is about the course of their relationship, with its ups, downs, and ultimate destination.  Where it really nails it is in the execution.  The story is presented in non-linear order (think Pulp Fiction) so that the details of their relationship only become clearer to you a little bit at a time.

Courtney and I have been married now for nearly nine years, and dated for about two years before that.  It's been a long time since I've been in the situation that the people in this movie are in, but another way that this movie really succeeded is that it instantly made me remember those feelings - the exhilaration and fascination that defines the beginning of something new, the worries as you wonder where things are headed, the many levels of hurt when things don't work out.  (500) Days of Summer brought all of those things back to the surface.  I could identify with these characters.  They don't meet in some ridiculous "only in the movies" way, like they both reach for the last muffin at the bakery and fight over it but then fall in love, and they don't stay together for some stupid reason like they both have a bet with their friends/bosses/editors that they can make a relationship work, only to realize that *!WOW!* they really do love each other.

OK, up to this point I've stayed pretty spoiler-free, but skip this paragraph if you really want to watch this movie with a clean slate.  My one disappointment with this movie is also one of the things that made me really respect it - Summer and Tom's final scene, when they talk one last time after she's married.  I respected this because it was true-to-life.  This is a thing that happens, relationships end, one party inevitably moves on faster than the other, and the other person is left with additional hurt because of that.  I just wished that she seemed to have some sort of sorrow over the pain she'd caused him, or had some better answer for his questions.  But again, I know that in real life it doesn't play out that way.  You know that final scene in Swingers, when Jon Favreau's ex finally calls him, and he gets to have his moment of triumph by hanging up on her?  I wanted Tom to have that moment, too.  That's a small nitpick on an otherwise great movie, though.

Two more links to send you out on.  First, this one, which has my favorite scene in the entire movie, and one of the best laughs I've had at a movie in a long time, at about 0:21-0:25.  I think that most guys can identify with that part.  Second, this one, which is only tangentially related, but which makes me think of Summer.

RATING - I really recommend this movie.  I give it five Ringos out of five.  (Her favorite Beatle is Ringo!  There's your MPDG quirk, right there.)

LESSON - Don't let your past baggage prevent you from being open to new possibilities.

Project Valentine, Day 4: From Here to Eternity

Day 4 of Project Valentine, and I'm a little discouraged.  I really tried to pick four classic romances for the first four movies, but it's not working out entirely how I'd hoped.  I've seen four good movies, movies with interesting stories and scenes that contained love interests, but I don't think that any one of them could be strictly termed a romance film.

I thought for sure that From Here to Eternity would be the movie to crank up the romance.  I mean, it's #20 on AFI's 100 Years, 100 Passions list!  Its most famous scene (the one that everybody on earth has seen, even if they haven't seen the rest of the movie) is of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr tumbling in the surf together.  It's right there on the box cover of the movie!  Really, though, the movie is more of a melodrama, set against a background of army life.  There happen to be two love stories involved in the plot, but they never really succeeded in making me feel like they were the central plot.  And I don't want to spoil that beach scene for you if you haven't seen it, but they only kiss for like 5 seconds and then fight for like 5 minutes.

Still, I do recommend this movie for several reasons.  First, for its place in film history - FHTE took home some serious hardware at the Oscars.  Second, for its place in film metahistory - remember the part of The Godfather where Don Corleone gets the plum movie role for washed-up singer Johnny Fontaine, who then goes on to win the Oscar?  Rumors have it that Mario Puzo took more than a little inspiration for that character from Frank Sinatra, who at the time he was cast in this part was a little washed-up in his own career, and who went on to win the Oscar.

And speaking of Sinatra, this was the first movie I've ever seen of his.  It's interesting to see "The Chairman of the Board," a man whose persona was largely made up of the power that he wielded over everything around him, step into the role of Maggio, a pipsqueak peon.  He even gets to sing for a quick second or two!

As far as the romantic aspect of the movie goes, maybe it worked better for audiences of a different era.  Kerr and Lancaster's relationship, although passionate, is adulterous and clearly doomed from the outset.  The other relationship, between Montgomery Clift and Donna Reed's characters, begins in jealousy and never really shows us a clear reason why it advances past that to the point where they trust and need each other.

Like I said, though, the romances really take backseat to the drama of the story of barracks life that makes up most of the rest of the movie, and that's a pretty solid story.

RATING - Definitely worth seeing.  I give this one four bugle mouthpieces out of five.

LESSON - This part is proving more difficult than I had thought!  I'm going to say that the lesson from this one is twofold.  First, don't let passion blind you to differences which either need to be worked out or acknowledged.  Second, treasure time together, because you never know when it may end.

Project Valentine, Day 3: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.  This is the first movie on my list that I've gone into with a completely clean slate, with no previous knowledge.  That alone won it some points up front.  It's nice when a movie can still surprise me.

I added this movie as a little challenge to myself to see if I could overcome my perception of Barbra Streisand and give the movie a fair shot.  A lifetime as a straight American dude doesn't really put me into her main demographic of fans.  I'm just saying.  Then there's the parent factor.  You know how there are certain things that your parents love which you also end up embracing?  In my case, a few of these things would be The Beatles (mom & dad), submarine movies (dad), and halvah (mom).  But then there are those other things that your parents love which you end up rejecting with special fervor, for no real reason other than the fact that your parents love them.  My parents may read this, so I'm going to decline to list any of those here.  Well, except for Barbra Streisand.  I know that for women of a certain generation, especially those (like my mom) who are products of Jewish heritage, Babs looms large, but for me?  Meh...  I really tried to be fair, though.

The premise of On a Clear Day is actually a pretty interesting and unique one.  A young lady (Streisand) goes to see a hypnotist(Yves Montand) in the hope that he can help her quit smoking, a habit her fiance disapproves of.  When she displays clairvoyant abilities, he is much more interested in that.  He agrees to hypnotize her, she believes to help her quit smoking, but his real purpose is to figure out how she came by her gift.  What he discovers instead is that she has lived many previous lives, one of which he holds long conversations with and eventually falls in love with.

Two interesting casting notes - Bob Newhart and Jack Nicholson both have small but key roles, early enough in their careers that they were not yet "Bob Newhart" and "Jack Nicholson."

I'm not entirely sure whether I liked this movie or not.  On one hand, like I said, the story really is a pretty interesting one.  On the other hand, Barbra Streisand... Sigh.  As I said, I really did try to be fair, but she really was not cast well in this part.  As the modern day neurotic college girl, sure, but in the prior life scenes, where she's playing somebody English, it's just painful.  She really takes you out of the story.

RATING - I'm sorry, try as I might, Babs just did me in.  I've got to give this one two daisies out of five.

LESSON - Phew, this one's kind of hard, because it was a pretty trippy movie.  Um...  Dig deeper to find the person beneath the strange outer shell?  True love is a matter of destiny and fate, and will catch you eventually?  I dunno, I'm going to bed.

Project Valentine, Day 2: His Girl Friday

His Girl Friday is one that's been on my list for a long time.  I didn't actually realize until after I'd watched it that this was also directed by Howard Hawks, who directed Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.  The guy knew his way around a romantic comedy.

This was one of those movies that seems instantly familiar when you do see it, because it's been referenced, spoofed, and copied a hundred times over.  In fact, one of my favorite SNL sketches of all time was a pretty faithful take of His Girl Friday.  I've scoured the internet trying to find a video of it, but you'll just have to settle for a transcript of "His Muse Friday." 

To be honest, I nearly scrapped this review and watched a second movie tonight, because this one just baaaarely makes it under the wire as a romance.  Cary Grant plays the editor-in-chief of a leading newspaper, and he's willing to do anything to get a story.  Rosalind Russell plays his ex-wife, who also used to be his paper's star reporter.  She pays him a visit one day to let him know that she's about to remarry, move away, and setlle down - she's just come by to wish him farewell.  The rest of the movie involves him trying to lure her back, first as a reporter to cover an impending execution, then as his romantic interest.  The dialogue between the two leads comes machine gun fast, with plenty of zingers, a style that's become this film's signature.  I say that it barely qualifies as a romance, though, because for most of the movie the love triangle between Grant, Russell, and her new fiance is kind of a secondary plot, and it isn't until the movie's final scene that any kind of romance reignites between the leads.  There's plenty of chemistry, but no indication that it's going to end the way that it does.  In fact, I turned to Courtney with about ten minutes left and said, "Unless this thing changes direction pretty dramatically in the next few minutes, I think I'm going to have to watch something else tonight."  Luckily for me, it did exactly that.

More than thoughts of romance, this movie made me wonder if there is any profession that is more different in real life from how it is shown onscreen than journalism.  Think of reporters in the movies: Lois Lane in Superman, Catcher Block in Down With Love, etc.  They're generally sexy, successful, and well-known.  Maybe when His Girl Friday was made, that was actually the nature of the newspaper business.  Now?  Well, I have a feeling that if my kids watch this movie in another 15 years, when they're old enough to understand it, I'll have to explain to them what a newspaper is, and why people used to pay for them.

Two movies into my marathon, and I'm also picking up on one of the big cliches of romantic comedies: if you want to find the person who you're going to fall in love with, just find the person who you hate the most and stick around long enough.  Voila!  Love connection!

I'm glad to finally have seen this, and if you're a fan of dialogue-driven movies you'll like it, too.  There's some great one-liners, but I don't feel like the movie itself has entirely stood the test of time.  The plot stretches pretty thin sometimes in service of the jokes, and there are times when it really does drag on.  Of course, I guess you could say the same thing about most modern romantic comedies, too.

RATING - Three typewriters out of five.

LESSON - Never underestimate the importance of chemistry, and don't be afraid to find a woman who challenges you.

PS - If you're bored and have about 90 minutes, here's the whole movie for you to watch.

Project Valentine, Day 1: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

As with Project Horror, I decided to kick off Project Valentine with a block of classic movies.  Somehow, I'd made it this far in my life without ever watching a Marilyn Monroe movie, and decided that I'd like to go ahead and change that with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

This is one of those roles that's so iconic, so closely associated with the actress who played it, that it was a surprise to me to learn that this movie was made fairly early in Monroe's career.  This, along with two other movies that came out in 1953, was her first true breakout role.  At the time this was made, Jane Russell was actually the much bigger star.  The studio wasn't sure if Monroe had what it took to be the lead in a movie, so they gave Russell top billing, and generated rumors that the two women couldn't stand each other in order to spark publicity.  In truth, Russell and Monroe remained friends until Marilyn Monroe's death almost a decade later.

Back in college I watched the movie 42nd Street with the girl I was seeing at the time, and we both noticed something - there really aren't that many movies made anymore about putting on a show, but classic Hollywood was swimming in them.  Singing in the Rain, Kiss Me Kate, and on and on...  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes isn't about that, but does set us up in the first scene with the knowledge that our heroines are cabaret performers, all the better to prepare us for the musical numbers to come.

Lorelei, the character played by Monroe, is engaged to a wealthy young man, and is planning to marry him in France.  His father, however, disapproves, and prevents him from traveling with her.  Instead, she travels alone, with her friend Dorothy (Russell) as a chaperone.  The fiance's father hires a private detective to sail on the same cruise ship the ladies are on and try to find any dirt which would prevent the marriage.  There's more, but that's the gist of it right there.  What makes this movie work isn't so much the plot, but the execution.  Russell is sharp as a knife, and delivers in every scene she's in.  And Marilyn Monroe...

This was a great first movie to see Marilyn Monroe in.  She is one of that small number of performers whose legend looms so large that you can't separate the performance from the legend.  She really was much more than just a pretty face (although that was definitely one pretty face) - her comic timing and delivery was top notch.  When she finally meets her potential father-in-law, she has my favorite line of the entire movie.

Esmond Sr.: Have you got the nerve to tell me you don't want to marry my son for his money?
Lorelei Lee: It's true.
Esmond Sr.: Then what do you want to marry him for?
Lorelei Lee: I want to marry him for YOUR money.

Because I am thoughtful, before I give my rating and lesson learned from this movie, first I'm going to put a little something for the ladies.





I really enjoyed this movie.  It's more comedy than romance, but it still had enough of a love story that I feel like it qualifies for Project Valentine.

RATING - I give this one five Marilyns out of five.

LESSON - A relationship can't succeed without openness, as is shown by both ladies' situations in this movie.  (OK, that's not an especially deep one, but I'm just getting started.  Give me a few days to get up to speed.)