Entertainment Weekly has a list of romantic comedy cliches it wants to ban forever from the wisecracking best friend to the adorably uncontrollable dog, the trying-on-clothes montage, the makeover, the chase through the airport (have they ever heard of cell phones?) and the lip-synching. I’m already on record as being opposed to the last two. But I think most people who buy tickets to romantic comedies expect and want those conventions to be there, don’t you?
“There are so many movies about love for the same reason there are so many movies about lost treasure and secret formulas and war battles and historical accomplishments, because love really is life’s great adventure,” says film critic Nell Minow, who has been reviewing movies as The Movie Mom since 1995.
“And we like to see movies about love for the same reason we like to see other movies about adventures — to experience the vicarious thrill, the challenge, the uncertainty and the happy ending. Long before there were movies, there were fairy tales, which ended with happily ever after….”
A great love story for Minow makes viewers believe the characters “get” each other. They won’t be happy every day but they ultimately will live happily ever after. Two of her favorite true-to-life romances are 1987’s “Moonstruck” starring Cher and Nicolas Cage, and 2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”–the all-male assembly line–once stood 100. Walt was the impresario of a troop of young women, most under 25–a casting director’s dream of all-American acolytes–who made the screen light up, not with feathered swan dives or the perfect tip-tap of a patent-leather heel, but by making water shimmer or a tail wag just so. It was a job complicated by his unrelenting perfectionism–Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors–but reducible to a simple imperative of the time: ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good.
I could not resist the opportunity to interview one other treasured behind-the-scenes woman, Marge Belcher Champion, famous as half of the dancing Champions of screen and stage, but known to Disney aficionados world wide as the real-live model for Snow White.
Champion was only 14 and still in school when she received $10 a day to act the part of Snow White for the Disney animators to use as their model. She later went on to partner with her husband Gower Champion in films like “Show Boat” and “Jupiter’s Darling.” But here she is helping the first Disney feature film come to life.
Three recent movies in different genres have had one thing in common — fathers who interact with the ghosts of their dead daughters. In the historical drama “Creation,” Charles Darwin sees the ghost of his daughter as his struggle to deal with her loss reflects in part his struggle over whether to publish his controversial theory of evolution. In the literary adaptation “The Lovely Bones,” the spirit of a murdered girl is stuck in the “in between” as she tries to help her devastated family and expose the killer. And in the thriller “Edge of Darkness,” Mel Gibson plays a cop whose 24-year-old daughter is murdered. As he seeks to understand what she was involved in, he sees her ghost as both a child and an adult, with an especially sweet scene with her at about age five helping him shave.
I always wonder, when something like this happens, whether it is some sort of harmonic convergence or just a coincidence.
The film critic is not a part of the entertainment industry. The film critic is a part of the journalism industry. We are there to report on, assess, and illuminate the entertainment industry and its products. We are there to guide audiences away from the over-marketed and under-produced products of that industry and to encourage them to try movies they might not have heard of, even those without big stars and in other languages. We are there to challenge their thinking, provide context, and provoke discussion. And we are there to set an example with the diligence of our study and the excellence of our writing to engage them in our passionate attention to stories, characters, meaning, and even entertainment.
All of the entries are provocative, well-written, and worth reading. Take a look.
