A near-death experience plus all-conquering love put ‘The Vow’ squarely in the illness-as-aphrodesiac column.
Once upon a time, potential young lovers could watch a cancer movie together, hoping a weeping session would make that special someone all clingy and compliant.
Ali MacGraw will be addressing a crowd at San Francisco’s Castro Theater this Valentine’s Day, along with a screening of Love Story(1970). If “Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,” as that tearjerker’s famous tagline went, irony means never having to mean it when you say you’re sorry.
Erich Segal’s lachrymatory work is being continued. 2012 will see the 10th Nicholas Sparks film adaptation in 10 years. Sparks (Message in A Bottle, Dear John, The Notebook) is, as his website boasts, the “explorer of the profound mystery of the human heart.” His market-tested formula frees the viewer from the pressure of being a modern Nostradamus. Sparks’ Law: The better and more valuable person in any given pair of lovers will be the one who’s headed for a dirt nap. Shipwreck, Ecuadorian mudslide, our old friend cancer: so far everything but lupus, crossbow mishap and tiger attack.
This April we’ll see the release of Scott Hicks’ version of Sparks’ The Lucky One. Zac Efron is an Iraq vet searching for the mystery girl (Taylor Schilling) who kept him sane when he was over there teaching the Shiites how to sing “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Internet voices mutter over the Sparksitude of The Vow, the VD weekend release with Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum. It’s an ostensibly true story, based on the lives of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter of Las Vegas, N. Mex. After a horrific car accident, Krickitt went into a year-and-a-half-long coma. She came up amnesiac with no memory of her husband. MacAdams’ character is nursed back to health through the power of romance, bowling dates and bouquets.
It’s like a real-life 50 First Dates, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But what it’s really like is Sparks’ The Notebook(indeed, the film version starred MacAdams), only with a happy ending.
In an interview, Mr. Kim Carpenter told the Los Angeles Timesthat he sought neither money or publicity. “I made a vow before God,” he says. “I made that commitment. That’s what I want people to really feel.”
The way our nation’s preachers could spin these heartfelt words should be obvious. Until death do we part. That’s right, I’m talking to you, Kim Kardashian, you scoff-marriage. How are we supposed to keep the fruitbats and baritone-ladies away from the altar when you carry on like that?
One prefers films that emphasize the jungle chase rather than the cage time afterwards. Last year’s mortality-romance One Day, for instance. It wasn’t a hit, thanks likely to the brutal way director Lone Scherfig played the death card. And not everyone caramelizes when they see Anne Hathaway. Its focus on work was unusual: all romance and no work makes a dull film.
But it seemed a much more effective sob story than Hathaway’s other recent film, Love and Other Drugs, better known for its sex scenes with Jake Gyllenhaal than its plot. Understandable; the sex scenes were fabulous. That time, the work subplot—about the skullduggery of Big Pharma—dissolved under relentless montage. And then Hathaway came down with good old Hollywood Movie Disease, possibly as payback for taking her clothes off with such insouciance.
Superhero movies have an untapped capacity for romanticism: remember Zorro? Maybe Hathaway will bring some romance to the Catwoman/Batman coupling in The Dark Knight Rises. Director Christopher Nolan isn’t an ice cube, despite the too-frequent comparisons critics make between him and Stanley Kubrick. Still, as the blogger with the nom de plume Self Styled Siren wrote, “I have heels that are more dangerous than Anne Hathaway.”
More Than A Little Bromance
Bromance and cancer: the perfect coupling. 50/50had cancer-struck Joseph Gordon-Leavitt ditching his mean painter girlfriend Bryce Dallas Howard, clearing the decks for Gordon-Levitt’s main romance with hunky Seth Rogen.
Rogen also had a fling with Asian singing sensation Jay Chou in The Green Hornet, where Cameron Diaz did the bearding instead of Anna Kendrick. In Moneyball, we had Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill as the oddly-matched pair. Hill looked like “a sheep in heat,” griped Bruno Ganz’s Hitler in the latest YouTube Fuhrergram.
And there was The Bridesmaids, Oscar-certified and Judd Apatow–shepherded, starring Kristin Wiig. Too bad for Wiig; she certainly looks like she knows how to play romantic comedy. Her film’s beard is an Irish cop (Chris O’Dowd) initially rejected by Wiig because he dared to make breakfast for her after a night together.
Jay Chou brings Rogen a latte in Green Hornetand it’s a gesture of manly respect. Chris O’Dowd makes breakfast for Kristin Wiig and the audience is geared to think, “Bro, are you hiding a vage?” Despite the Irishman, Wiig ends up with Seth Rogen after all—although in this case Rogen is shaved, wearing a dress and disguised with 100 extra pounds. He uses the stage name Kelda McKinney.
Pixie Love
Critic Nathan Rabin coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” to describe a type we’ve got by the gross. Rabin’s list of top five MPDGs overstates the trope: it includes two Preston Sturges heroines. A true MPDG should be studiously little-girlish. No one would say that about Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, even if Rabin tossed her on the list.
When I think MPDG, I think of Liza Minnelli in the 1969 film The Sterile Cuckoo—a little scary, maybe dark and furtive. What was it said about MPDG Shiela McCarthy in I’ve Heard The Mermaids Singing”? “Like being cornered by an elf with a machine gun”?
Today’s pixie fetish may be an invocation to Audrey Hepburn, but modern films are more sexually flagrant. Today, when the rubber meets the road, the reaction isn’t, “Wow, I’m seeing [MPDG’s name here] naked” but “Yikes—I didn’t know she was pubescent!”
Most influential of Oughties waifs is Zoe Deschanel ((500) Days of Summer, Gigantic), who is currently on TV exhibiting unspecific vivaciousness. And there’s MPDG Carey Mulligan, last seen in Shamedisemboweling herself using the tune “New York, New York” as sharp object. Most of the courtship in Drivewas Mulligan going ultra-ethreal. Eventually Ryan Gosling showed what she meant to him by stomping in the head of a killer in the elevator next to her. It’s a shoutout to Gaspar Noé’s hearts- and flowers-laden Irreversible.
Melanie Laurent was a fire-colored avenging angel in Inglourious Basterds. She turns up in Mike Mills’ Beginnersfully MPDGd, dressed like a Chaplin/Annie Hall hybrid and unable to speak. What could be more little-girl than a vow of silence?
In Like Crazy, pocket-sized Felicity Jones was an international shuttlecock badmittened between nations. She played a British exchange student involved with LA’s Anton Yelchin. An innocent victim of circumstance, she forgot to renew her passport. The montage shows why—too fucking busy or the other way around.
That Century
So: Vertigo (1958), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Annie Hall (1977) and lastly The Big Sleep (1946), the latter of which is underrated as romance, though it contains a rare sight in a movie. I mean women and men looking very levelly at each other, without resentment, during the course of the solving of those mysteries of the human heart Sparks is slaving away at, holding his chin and gnawing on his pencil eraser.
