BEFORE: Another film that probably deserves to be part of a February chain to be judged properly, but I've put it here between two other films with Ewan McGregor in them - the lead-out from "Moulin Rouge" is perhaps a bit obvious, but it will suffice. This will get me to connect to the Charlize Theron chain, and that will set me up to watch some sci-fi when I get back from Comic-Con.
I just got back from our weekend in Massachusetts, and I've got just 24 hours before I have to start packing for San Diego. Whose idea was that?
THE PLOT: It's New York City in 1962, and love is blooming between a journalist and a feminist advice author, who's falling head over heels despite her beau's playboy lifestyle.
AFTER: As with "Moulin Rouge", it doesn't do anyone any good for me to just write this off as a terrible film. I have to try and break down WHY this is a terrible film, or else I'm never going to learn, and Hollywood will never learn to stop making terrible films.
First off, they tried to resurrect the genre of the 1960's sex comedy, but to me, that sort of enterprise is doomed to fail. It would be like trying to resurrect film noir, or silent slapstick films like the Keystone Kops. Different genres had their day, and everything falls out of favor at some point. If they didn't, we'd all still be watching films set in World War II, or Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, or Westerns. There is an ebb & flow to this sort of thing, I get that once in a while someone will try to revive a genre, and we'll get a World War II film like "Pearl Harbor" or a musical like "Chicago", or a Western like the "True Grit" remake. But even though those films were successful, none of them managed to bring back their entire genre, they were just one-offs.
At some point, the furor over superhero films will die down, just as the trend of slasher films ran its course, and so did teen sex comedies like "Risky Business" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" - everything eventually finds its place, burns bright for a while and then fades out. The reason I don't get the attempt to revive 60's sex comedies like "Pillow Talk" or "Sex and the Single Girl" is that they were so rooted in the sensibilities of that decade - like men wore suits and worked in offices, and women took care of the house but were trying to make strides in the business world at the same time. That conflict was then, and (for the most part) we got past it.
(EDIT: Wikipedia suggests that this film is indeed a pastiche of three specific films: "Pillow Talk", "Lover Come Back" and "Send Me No Flowers". If "Moulin Rouge!" was also a stitched-together version of three specific stories, that's an odd back-to-back coincidence.)
So all of the tropes that a film set in that decade should seem unbelievably quaint to the audience now, you can't really have a man in the 1960's say "Ha ha, a woman working - sure, she can get me some coffee!" without that man looking like a tremendous ass. And if that's your intent, fine, but unless you can somehow inject some sly winks, you're not advancing the cause, you're just bringing up old battles that were fought long ago.
About halfway through this film, I noticed there were some sly winks. The film allowed men to be chauvinistic for a while, but then it started coming at the battle of the sexes from a different angle, namely one that started to try and hold the men accountable for their enormously misguided attitudes. Once again, as in "Irma La Douce" and "Moulin Rouge!", a man takes on a false identity in order to win a woman's love - only here, he's a magazine writer who's determined to prove that her liberated theories about women not needing love are merely a facade.
I know, I know, more writers - and it's a double-dose here because she's written a book, and he's supposed to be writing a magazine article about the book. But he keeps breaking their lunch and dinner meetings in order to sleep with one stewardess or secretary after another. (Another way men aren't portrayed well here - the implication is that they'd all sleep with three each day, if they had the chance.) Ah, but when he eventually sees her photo, and realizes how beautiful she is, suddenly he's interested in writing that article again.
Too late, he missed his chance, and her book gains national attention without his help. So he does the only logical thing - impersonate an astronaut, gain her confidence, romance her, bed her, prove that women are creatures who only dream of impossible romantic love, and debunk her theories of women advancing themselves in the workplace via casual, non-committed sex.
Women don't really get off scott-free here, and in the end I can't decide which is more insulting - suggesting that women can have either a career or a relationship, but not both, or suggesting that eating chocolate is a fair female substitute for romance. And then I'm not sure, but I think the film ends up supporting the argument that it was trying to debunk in the first place, that women can't get by without finding, or at least seeking, impossible romantic love.
You see, there is a twist to the proceedings, and most times I'd be ill-advised to even mention that there is a twist, let alone to state what the twist entails, but I simply have to here, because it's so unbelievable, so far-fetched that it will make your head spin. It's so convoluted that I think I can safely say that it would never, ever happen in real life, and I doubt it could even happen in the fantasy world. Oh, they tried, but I'm just not buying it.
They got really clever with the title, which allowed them to use an old Judy Garland song, and footage of Judy herself (uncredited, for some reason) singing that song, which is also the title of the film, and the title of the book-within-the-film. But they got an impersonator (Will Jordan, last seen in "Broadway Danny Rose") to play Ed Sullivan and introduce her, and the fact that he's been in several films as the famous TV host proves to me that you only need to do one thing well in this world to succeed. Seriously, he played Ed Sullivan in "The Doors", "Mr. Saturday Night" and movies about Elvis, Buddy Holly and The Beatles. Good gig.
Also starring Renée Zellweger (last seen in "Cold Mountain"), David Hyde Pierce (last seen in "Nixon"), Sarah Paulson (last seen in "The Notorious Bettie Page"), Jeri Ryan (last seen in "The Kid"), Rachel Dratch (last seen in "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry"), Tony Randall (last seen in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex"), Jack Plotnick, with cameos from Laura Kightlinger (last seen in "Must Love Dogs"), Chris Parnell (last seen in "The Dictator"), Florence Stanley (last seen in "The Odd Couple II"), Marc Shaiman.
RATING: 3 out of 10 bomb protestors
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