BEFORE: March 8 is International Women's Day, part of Women's History Month, and look, I've got a film with a female lead character, one that pokes fun at romantic comedies and points out how unrealistic they all are - it's really random happenstance that this coincided with the holiday, but I'm very willing to roll with it. It's also International Collaboration Brew Day, which is when a bunch of female brewmasters get together (or remain apart, I'm honestly not sure) and brew the same collaborative beer in their respective breweries around the world. This is a holiday celebration I can get behind. It's run by the Pink Boots Society and the revenue raised goes toward educational scholarships and member programming. Check the Pink Boots Society web-site to find if your local brewery is participating, and if so, what their female brewmaster did with the hops that they received. Or use the hashtag #pinkbootsbrew on Instagram or Twitter to find out.
The earliest version of International Women's Day was organized by the American Socialist Party (umm, ok...) in 1909, and then German delegates at the 1910 Socialist Woman's Conference proposed an annual celebration (wait, German Socialists? hold on a sec...) And then after women gained suffrage in Soviet Russia in 1917, IWD was made a national holiday, and they settled on March 8, as the first IWD protests in Petrograd on March 8 marked the beginning of the February Revolution. (Yeah, you read that right, apparently March 8, 1917 in our current calendar was February 23 on the Julian calendar, which was being used at the time. Confused? I sure am...)
Yeah, I'm just learning now that the history of this holiday seems a little tied to Socialism in Russia and Germany - that's a bit close to Communists and Nazis, isn't it? Nazis were German Socialists, too... Look, I'm glad that the ball is rolling now on this holiday, but maybe you don't want to dig too deeply into how this all started, that's all I'm saying. The United Nations didn't start celebrating the holiday until 1975, with a strong focus on women's rights - big picture here, that's a really good thing overall.
Adam Devine carries over from "When We First Met"
THE PLOT: A young woman disenchanted with love mysteriously finds herself trapped inside a romantic comedy.
AFTER: The good news is that this is a fairly strong comedy with a confident actress in the lead role, and in real life Rebel Wilson stands for body positivity and is also a writer, producer, singer with a great track record, excelled at math in school, studied acting at the Australian Theater, also at Second City in New York, had a breakout role in "Bridesmaids" before appearing on some sit-coms, did voice-work in the "Ice Age" series, then broke out AGAIN in "Pitch Perfect". But then there's sort of a stretch where she played characters with "Fat" right in their names, and even though she was a weight loss and nutrition spokesman for Jenny Craig in Australia, there have been times where producers supposedly forbid her to lose weight - what was going on there? Sure, bigger women are funnier, but it's not a hard and fast rule, skinnier women can be funny too, there's not a direct connection. Unless the producers were casting her as a fat girl just to make fun of her...Hmm...I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about that. Recently she's been publicly talking about working out and losing weight again, honestly I'm fine with whatever size anybody wants to be. I don't want to add to anybody's pressure to lose weight to meet some kind of impossible standard - I surrendered in that fight myself a long time ago. You do you, Rebel, if you want to get healthy and lose weight, you do that, but if you don't want to, then please don't - you're funny and fine either way.
The best thing about this movie, I think, is that nobody talks about her size, including her - it just is what it is, which feels a bit like the way it should be. Just like there was a transgender actress in "Can You Keep a Secret", and it was never mentioned, never part of the plot, not used as a plot point, it just WAS. This is a sign of progress, believe it or not, because on some level it's just acceptance (or the Conservatives would say "normalizing"), either the audience knows that the actor playing the middle-level company manager is trans, or they don't - it doesn't matter either way, nor should it. I didn't even feel the need to mention it, because it didn't matter to the enjoyment of the movie. Except for the fact that if you know, then every aspect of that character is sort of magnified, under a closer microscope, just because it's all still a little new to most people. If that boss is a mean or unfair boss, then the movie's kind of saying that all trans people make unfair bosses. If that boss is incompetent, then trans people are incompetent. Do you know what I mean? That's really where gay characters were in the movies about 30 or 40 years ago - check out any gay character in a film from the 80's, and they're made up of mostly worn-out stereotypes. (The sole exception from that time may have been Billy Crystal's character on "Soap".)
I bring this up today because "Isn't It Romantic" has an extensive middle section that takes place in a fantasy world, it's the main character's mental version of a romantic comedy, while she's in a coma after a head injury. And in that world, Donny, her gay neighbor is super-gay, or the Hollywood rom-com version of the gay best friend/fashion adviser/interior decorator type. Is this OK, in a movie made in 2019, to fall back on all these old, tired, super-expressive, lispy and effeminate stereotypes for a gay character? I'm not sure that it is. Later, when Natalie comes out of the fantasy, she learns that Donny really is gay, only less queeny than he was in the fantasy. Now, it's pretty convenient that in a dream sequence we're not really responsible for what we dream about - but just know that in Natalie's head, a gay man is super-queeny. Even though that stereotype might have been fixed into place by watching too many Hollywood rom-coms, and therefore cinema society is to blame, but it's still THERE, in her head, and she's holding on to those tropes.
The rest is largely OK, you can get away with a lot when you set scenes in this fantasy world - there doesn't need to be a rational explanation why a crowd of strangers would suddenly break into a dance number that they all somehow know, or why Natalie's best friend IRL would be her strongest competition in the office (because that's what many rom-coms do, pit two women against each other), or why the executive she met briefly in her pitch presentation suddenly has an Australian accent in the fantasy world. It's her crazy, damaged brain trying to recover, and jamming a bunch of pieces of the real world together, mixing them up with bits of movie techniques, and trying to make sense of it all. But she also gains some insight to the fact that she's been "Friend-zoning" her co-worker Josh, and even though he's got a hot model/yoga teacher girlfriend in the fantasy world, maybe Josh deserves some consideration as a romantic partner in the real world, if she can ever figure out how to get back there.
Natalie's initial thought is that she can only get out of this fantasy world by finding true love, but what does that even mean? And who is she supposed to find it with? And, more importantly, by being so meta- about the process and being so open about featuring all these rom-com tropes, does that, in itself, forgive using them again in THIS movie? Again, I'm not sold on this as an idea, but I bet a lot of people let this slide, because it's all done with a knowing wink to the audience - "Oh, THIS is what we're doing now." I hate to mention this, but once back in the real world, there's one more spontaneous musical number, which COULD mean that Natalie never really escaped from the fantasy world. That's a bit of "Isn't It Inception", perhaps? When you finally wake up from a long, complicated dream - how can you be sure that you HAVE woken up?
This is a very sneaky way to make a film that ends up being (nearly) error-free. All of those typical movie "goofs" can be explained away by the setting of a fantasy world where anything is possible. I can't point out, for example, that Natalie's apartment managed to grow much larger, while her apartment BUILDING remained the same size, at least on the outside. Doesn't matter, fantasy world, anything can happen, and it frequently does. My only NITPICK POINT might concern the karaoke scene, where Natalie begins singing with the track to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", only to have someone trip over the cord to the karaoke machine and unplug it, forcing her to sing a cappella, if only for a few bars before three women in the audience chime in with harmonized backing vocals, and rhythm and percussion gets provided by the sounds of beer taps and salt shakers from the bar. It's a great idea, and someone clearly intended for the music track to continue with help from these sources. But I guess that proved to be impossible, because the music comes BACK very quickly, and maybe somebody plugged the karaoke machine back in, but would it start up again with the same song, only 1 minute further into the song than when it got unplugged? I know, fantasy world, don't overthink it, except that's what I do.
It's cool that the fantasy New York looks so much cooler, brighter and more magical than the real thing. We've all come to expect this from movies, so it's nice to see a film that gets some humor out of the difference. AND it's a good positive message that Natalie doesn't NEED a partner to find true love in the fantasy world in order to escape. Everybody should have a romantic partner, if they want one, but not everybody should NEED one. There should be more romantic films, perhaps, where people remember to love themselves, too. No, not THAT way - you know what I meant, why did you have to go and make it sound all dirty?
Also starring Rebel Wilson (last seen in "Jojo Rabbit"), Liam Hemsworth (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Priyanka Chopra (last seen in "Baywatch"), Betty Gilpin (last seen in "Stuber"), Brandon Scott Jones (last seen in "Other People"), Jennifer Saunders (last heard in "Sing"), Jay Oakerson (last seen in "Hustlers"), Raymond Anthony Thomas, Zach Cherry, Sandy Honig, Tom Ellis, Esteban Benito, Seth Barrish (last seen in "Two Days in New York"), Michelle Buteau (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Bowen Yang, Alex Kis, with archive footage of Julia Roberts (last seen in "Wonder"), Richard Gere (last seen in "Norman"), Larry Miller (last seen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Adam Sandler (last seen in "Uncut Gems")
RATING: 6 out of 10 soup dumplings (God, I really miss soup dumplings....)
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