Why Lelaina in ‘Reality Bites’ was the worst love interest of them all

If you look at In Defense of Baroness Schraeder as my attempt at hyperbolic character rehab, this will be basically….the opposite of that. When I think back at my relationship with Reality Bites over the years, I tended to think of it in the form the exploding brain meme, but honestly the first step is so dumb that it didn’t even deserve to be represented by a brain. Instead, it’s more of an evolution:

I should note that I come to this quintessentially Gen X film from the perspective of a Millennial. It wasn’t made for me. I’m at the age where, as a year older than Sally Albright and Bridget Jones, I’d be considered a rom-com spinster, but I don’t quite need to fork out for expensive face serums (The Ordinary all the way, baby). But I’ve returned to this film over and over, just like the – now v. v. problematic – 80s teen movies I ate up in my youth.

How do you know I’m a Millennial? Because I felt physical anxiety over how much the characters in this movie smoke. Why do you care about AIDS, Janeane Garofalo? You’re all going to die prematurely of lung cancer anyway.

Janeane Garofalo’s character of Vickie is the only likeable person in this movie, of course. I think maybe it wants us to slut-shame her? She has a notebook by her bed with a numbered list of her lover’s names. She’s scared of AIDs. But you know what? I bet Troy has no memory of where his dick has been, throwing out Renee Zellweger’s number in the morning, meanwhile Vicki tootles herself down to get checked at the free clinic when she decides she should, and if she ever gets pregnant, she’s got a handy list of names and dates. Sounds like being a sensible person, to me.
She is also the only person in the group who can hold down a job for five minutes, performing well enough at the GAP to be promoted to manager. Let’s contrast with garbage queen Lelaina. She seems to have taken an assistant job at a cheesy morning TV show for the sole purpose of getting them to air her vanity documentary about her friends, a true match of content and audience if I ever heard one. Instead of, y’know, actually assisting, she tries to get the host to get his own coffee and enacts petty revenge that makes him look like he’s admitting to pedophilia when he doesn’t want to air her navel-gazing doco. Unsurprisingly, she gets fired. And utterly spits in Vickie’s face when Vickie suggests she has an opening at the GAP. “I’m not gonna work at the Gap for Christ’s sake!”. $5 an hour seems like a lot more than the $0 an hour you currently have lined up, but okay, just diminish your friend’s job that she’s proud of then.

Walking, talking trash raccoon Lelaina then:

• Has three whole unsuccessful job interviews
• Argues with her Mum that by no means should she have to look outside the journalism field for work (ha!)
• Runs up a $400 phone bill talking to a psychic
• Turns her spite on the people gently suggesting she might try getting her shit together
• When he refuses her a loan, steals from her dad (who handed her a free car and a gas card paid for a year) to pay the bill. And for a few six-packs of Coca-Cola

Nice moral high ground there, GAP-hater.

Of course Troy, aka everyone’s boyfriend when they’re 20 and have been in the general vicinity of a shitty band or an Arts degree, is the one to comfort Lelaina in her time of feels. He’s been fired from 12 jobs! He then uses her emotional distress to try and hit on her.

Of course this dude is so narcissistic he wants to make out with someone who has the same haircut as him.

Y’all need more than smokes, coffee and conversation. You need to pay your fucking rent.

To spoil the end of a 25-year-old movie, Reality Bites essentially posits that Lelaina forces him to be a bit more stable – with heavy attribution to his Dad’s death. I mean, the proof we have is he puts on a too-big suit and acts a bit humble for five seconds, so YMMV. I’m not sure what we’re meant to think Lelaina gets out of this, but whatever it is….she deserves it. Take a swim in that toxic masculinity lake for a while honey, you know you’ve been dying to. Ever since he told you “You can’t navigate me. I may do mean things, and I may hurt you, and I may run away without your permission, and you may hate me forever, and I know that scares the living shit outta you ’cause you know I’m the only real thing you got.”

The medium step of this evolutionary tale is to think that Michael, played by Ben Stiller (also the director of the movie, thanks) is a much more preferable boyfriend. He sure is! He does fuck up a bit in the middle getting overly-enthusiastic about Lelaina’s work and forgetting to get, y’know, her permission to use her IP, and he doesn’t mind getting in to a verbal pissing contest with Troy, but in what universe does Lelaina deserve this guy?

• They meet when she throws a lit cigarette in his car after cutting him off in traffic and laughing at him trying to do his job, which causes him to crash. THIS IS REASON ENOUGH.
• She breaks his Doctor Zaius figurine!
• She completely refuses to actually introduce him to her friends
• She asks him if he’s religious approximately 30 seconds in to their first date, and then leaves him open to attacks on his intelligence from radioactive-slime-made-sentient-Troy, even though she describes the Big Gulp as the most profound invention of her lifetime (all the essential vitamins and nutrients! If Lelaina has given up smoking in the year 2019 she’s definitely still dealing with some Type 2 Diabetes)
• She claims to Michael, who thinks her work would be a good fit for his channel, that she didn’t “want to think where it would end up” with regards to potentially commercialising her doco while she’s still making it, knowing full well she was still filming it while trying to get an airing on the morning show she was working on. Just admit you’re uncomfortable with emotional support because you’re used to being around Troy The Habitual Negger.
• Lelaina drastically over-reacts when Michael’s TV production company takes the raw material of her dire-looking dropkick documentary and makes what looks like a thoroughly-entertaining, Real-World-style reality TV show with MTV flourishes. Nonetheless, it wasn’t finalised and could have been solved with a simple discussion, but after her storming out he soon apologises and does his best to fix it.
• Too bad she’s already had a dose of Troy’s apparently very powerful peen
• I like think in a couple of years, Vickie looks up Michael in the Yellow Pages. FUNCTIONAL ADULTS UNITE.

Over the years, Reality Bites has essentially become a hate-watch about a couple of dirtbags. You can’t root for the central romance, because Lelaina shows she is incapable of growth despite theoretically being the main character, and Troy is a chronic manipulator who you can tell smells like stale cigarettes and unwashed clothes just by looking at him. They’re impossible to like, and don’t even seem to like each other that much.
In conclusion, Reality Bites is basically Wuthering Heights, if Wuthering Heights had an awesome scene with Cathy, Heathcliff and their mates getting stoned off their gourd and dancing to My Sharona in a gas station.

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‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’: The Victorian Values Review

It’s a mouthful. I’ve been shortening it to Guernsey – because a lot of this film is about Guernsey, and its experiences during WWII – but I was delighted when the girl at the box office told me that some people have been asking for tickets to ‘The Potato Movie’. Come on guys, Peter Dutton’s a long way off getting a biopic.

First up, as always, a trailer:

This particular film is a difficult one to talk about without spoilers, but golly there’s a few of them in the trailer, anyway. Part of the issue, of course, on basing your movie on a bestselling book (in this case, the 2008 novel of the same name) is that you want book fans to know that the key scenes and lines they love are in there. Nonetheless, the trailer could have dropped a little of the content and still been effective.

The movie starts thusly: Juliet Ashton (Lily James) is a successful writer in London, shortly after the end of WWII. She’s starting to become slightly disillusioned with the explosion of partying that has taken over London society, but is having a damn good time with her American diplomat beau, Mark. Her publisher Sidney (my boyfriend Matthew Goode) would be pretty darn happy if she’d just start her next book. Unexpectedly she received a letter from a pig farmer from the island of Guernsey named Dawsey Adams, asking for a book hookup for a group he’s part of – the titular Society. The story of the group’s origin (and let me reassure you – the name’s a gag) draws Juliet in to a correspondence, with her eventual decision to travel to Guernsey to meet this infamous group. Once she arrives, she becomes drawn in to their lives and the tales of what happened when Guernsey was under German occupation during the war.

I was lucky enough to be recommended the book by a friend many years ago, and was very excited when rumours broke in 2013 (yes, five years ago) that Michelle Dockery had been offered the lead, as I thought she would be perfect. To make it clear how long this movie has been in development hell – it was apparently initially intended to be a vehicle for Kate Winslet, and in 2013, Simon Curtis was attached to direct. Although Mike Newell ended up tapped to direct, the movie ended up maintaining the Downton Abbey connection from Dockery and Curtis (who is married to Elizabeth McGovern who played Cora), with a star turn for James (Rose), and support from Penelope Wilton (Isobel Crawley), Jessica-Brown Findlay (Sybil) and Goode (Henry Talbot). Taken together you’ve got a whole lotta people who are incredibly comfortable in period costume. Part of me can’t help but mourn for the idea of Dockery in the lead role, however – in the book, Juliet is 32 years old, and James, who has just turned 29, reads a bit young for a successful writer. She is bloody lovely to look at, though, and is less ‘mannered’ than I’ve seen her in other roles, allowing Juliet a bit of goofiness. The cast is mostly rounded out by people you’ve seen on the telly – like Katherine Parkinson from The IT crowd – and a man I shall henceforth know as The Extremely Handsome Michiel Huisman. Look, I’ve seen The Age of Adaline, I’ve seen Game of Thrones, and he has NEVER done it for me more than in his pig farmer get-up. I don’t understand it and I don’t particularly care to. He is extremely swoon-worthy – noble and caring and just a smidge sarcastic – in this movie.

Sexy men aside, there are so many factors at play that will determine whether you like this movie. I enjoy it, as I did the book, because I’m intrigued by the lives of ordinary people during WWII. I gobble up books and movies set in the period, even though I know they make me cry every fucking time (this one wasn’t too bad). However, if that bores you….this movie will probably bore you too. I will say that the period details are absolutely stunning, from Juliet’s fancy London get-ups, the phones, the recycled and repaired clothes from the folks on Guernsey, to the old-school ships and planes. There is a lot of attention to detail at work here, and I always want to give props to the people behind the scenes that hunt these pieces down and create props. While the story itself could easily be told in a TV movie, the budget that comes along with a studio feature has allowed some gorgeous work to be given a starring role. Also, a word of warning for the ladies: you will want to buy hats after this. Juliet wears an abundance of wonderful 1940s hats, and it’s no bloody coincidence that I saw this movie yesterday and went and bought a knit beret today.

Not as nice as this one though.

It’s also a love letter to Guernsey, with lush scenery (although it was predominantly filmed in Devon, unfortunately, due to the logistical issues of filming on the island). And what an extraordinary tale the locals had – the book was well-researched, but the movie also does an excellent job of showing just the kind of difficult position they were put in, forced to live alongside their enemy in such a small space for five years. Whilst the Blitz was a horrifying experience for any Londoner, Juliet quickly learns how different the Guernsey experience was to her own. The Society itself grew from an act of resistance, and she learns the complex interrelation between this small group and the occupying forces, and the legacy it has left behind.

The cast bring a lot of warmth, wit, and heart, to what is at its essence a drama. This is a movie that is hugely at risk of being being trod on by genre pics, coming out right in between A Quiet Place (which I also saw yesterday, and really should have seen first to give my heart an opportunity to recover) and Avengers: Infinity War, and as always, I try to review movies that are at risk of being ignored. However, I think just from the trailer, most people know if they want to see this movie or not. If you’re not interested because you don’t like romance…I’m not sure why you’re reading a Victorian Values review, but sure, skip it. If you’re interested but on the fence, I can assure you that the movie is unlikely to disappoint. It’s not a thrill-ride, but it’s stunning to look at, the leads are charming, and the ending is happy.  And Michiel Huisman is very, very handsome.

Lady Bird: The Victorian Values Review

In 2002, when Lady Bird begins, I was 16. As of yesterday, I’m precisely double that. An apt day to travel back in time, to when Nelly held positions three and four in the Billboard Top 100.

(the real tune of this movie is Justin Timberlake’s Britney revenge track Cry Me A River and you should definitely check out director Greta Gerwig’s letter to Timberlake to convince him to allow her permission to use the song solely for the term ‘full on make out‘, underlined for emphasis. This is extremely accurate btw, this is underlined make outs).

There were two pieces of feedback I took on when processing this movie. One was the review from a friend who’d already seen it – she didn’t like it, because she didn’t like the main character. The second was the couple chatting as we exited the cinema. She ‘didn’t get it’.

Let’s address the former first. I kinda knew from the trailer that the main character was going to be a bit infuriating. And I very much get the difficulty connecting with a story when you don’t like the main character – I get that feeling all the time. I cannot get in to Breaking Bad for the life of me. However. Lady Bird is a coming-of-age tale. The character needs to have somewhere to start from to grow.

And I’ve got a secret for you: the titular Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) is a lot of us as teenagers. She looks almost exactly like my older sister at 17, with shittily-dyed red hair, chokers and caked-on eyeliner, still insultingly beautiful in the way of some 17-year-olds. And almost all of us were raging assholes. I suspect the problem is we’ve become used to coming-of-age movies being about teenage boys. You probably didn’t hate William in Almost Famous, even though he was also a selfish shit who damn near tortured his mother. So I suspect we’re not trained think of girls in coming-of-age movies to be anything other than objects for teenage boys to fall in love with (Hello, Emma Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower). They have complicated inner lives too, and are battling their hormones just as much as teenage boys (that whole ‘girls mature faster’ thing? Yeah, we actually have to).

Now Lady Bird isn’t me as a teenager. For one thing, she is seriously extroverted (extroversion + hormones is a great recipe for a teenage asshole, by the way). She has what the nuns at her Catholic school call ‘a performative streak’ and god does she show it. So much yelling. But none of us can pretend that we didn’t know this person. We may all wish it gets channeled in to on-stage drama, but sometimes it just gets channeled  in to making a spectacle of yourself. It’s a damn good thing for Lady Bird that YouTube wasn’t around in 2002.  And extroversion isn’t necessarily something you grow out of. The character does mature over the course of the film, but she’s still drunkenly yelling out of windows at the end of the movie.

It’s a movie about relationships, but not really the ones you might think. Male-focused coming-of-age movies tend to be about falling in love, or lust, or whatever you want to call it. They’re not usually strictly romances, so it’s not necessarily about finding The One, just The One Who’ll Teach You Something About Yourself. Lady Bird has some excellent rite-of-passage relationships in the film – the closeted drama kid who just respects you so damn much he doesn’t really wanna touch you, the wanker in a band – but mostly, this is a movie about female relationships. The best friend. The mother. When it does touch on sex and relationships, it doesn’t punish Lady Bird for it. She can masturbate, she can lose her virginity and not fall pregnant her very first time (hello Saved! and Juno). Sure, her sexual experiences aren’t amazing pleasure-fests, but if you’re going to tell me yours were at that age, I’m gonna accuse you of boasting at best.

Cut to Lady Bird sharing a bathroom with her mother in their cramped abode, asking her when the right time to ‘do it’ is. Carefully weighing up how loaded this question is, Marion (Laurie Metcalfe) answers ‘College’. College is about right. She probably knows it’s all a little too late, but Lady Bird turns the conversation to her father, out of work and not coping well. This movie’s not just about being a teen, but about being lower-middle-class, and it’s for that reason, not her extroversion or her strong emotions or her ability to acquire more than one boyfriend, that I connected with Lady Bird. And it informs so much of her relationship with her mother. Neither her mother nor her father can give her a lot – they can give her love and good advice and try to set her up well for the future. You have to be an (early-series) Rory Gilmore angel-type to actually appreciate the sacrifices your parents make to give you a half-decent life, when you’re a teenager surrounded by kids with the shit you don’t have. This is perfectly encapsulated by Lady Bird and her best friend Julie, standing outside a fancy two-storey house, imagining their life inside it. A separate TV room. And snacks. Actually entertaining friends. Lady Bird’s shame about her neighbourhood, and her home, become a point of tension in her relationship with her Mum. And it’s not until you get a little bit older and wiser that you realise that even though all you want to do is give your kid more opportunities than you had, it still hurts like heck that the insecurity that’s part and parcel of being a teenager leads them to reject all the things you work hard to give them. That all they want to do is be somewhere else. Somewhere with the shine of glamour and intellectualism and maybe where they won’t have to shop in thrift stores. The heart of this tension is so incredibly real, and Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalfe bring so much to it that it made me want to call up my Mum.

If you’ve managed to catch I, Tonya, you know the flipside of this story. My forever crush Allison Janney plays Tonya Harding’s mother LaVona, tough-as-nails, and if she has a heart under there, it only shows in flashes. Whilst fighting for her opportunities, she essentially tries to scare Tonya (Margot Robbie, a revelation) in to achieving. It scars her and sets her up to see her entire life as a fight. Not a struggle. A fistfight. Marion gives Lady Bird some tough talk, but it’s done with a love that she can always recognise, will defend even in the middle of a fit of pique. She might be not believe it at the time, but it’s perfectly possible to be ‘scary and warm’, the perfect description for so many friend’s Mums that I want to go hug them all.

Part of coming-of-age is finding your people. Lady Bird handles the struggle of moving from childhood to adulthood and deciding what you want to keep perfectly. And it wasn’t really Lady Bird I connected with in this circumstance, but her childhood best friend Julie, neglected for the glamour of wealthier and cooler friends. Friends who wouldn’t touch the school play with a ten-foot pole. Because sometimes you end up being the friend who’s left behind. When our small-town grade of maybe 50 kids moved from primary school to a much bigger high school (although still very small in the grand scheme of high schools), my tall, beautiful, blonde, much more extroverted best friend of several years was swept off to the popular group, who liked me about as much as I liked them, which is to say not at all. She and I were never unfriendly, but drifting apart and being the friend who’s left behind sucks (although this is not a tale of woe…the group I eventually settled in, my people, the nerds, handed me the best friend I still have now). And this is such a real experience of being a teenage girl – shifting allegiances, shifting interests, while still feeling the strong bonds that no-one who’s never been a teenage girl can understand. No matter which position you’re in, you eventually have to decide what you fight to keep as you move in to being an adult.

I hope I’ve given Greta Gerwig enough credit for her script and directorial debut. A fitting love letter to her home town, the perfect encapsulation of a time (with a perfect soundtrack, hey there Dave Matthews), and a girl who’s allowed to be a bit of an asshole. This should win a whole bunch of Oscars, but I’m worried. That ‘I don’t get it’ reaction. Was it just the reaction of someone who needs their movies wrapped in a neat bow, lessons learned, no room for growth left in an 18-year-old character? Or do you have to have lived through it, to have your heart crash in to this film?

‘Hello, Academy? I’m nailing it over here. Pay attention’

An Incomplete Guide To Terrible Netflix Christmas Romances Pt 2

I’ve only watched three additional Terrible Netflix Christmas Romances, in part because did some extracurricular viewing of A Princess For Christmas (awful, awful, but Jamie Fraser is a strong drawcard) and A Royal Winter (actually…not too bad, as far as these things go?). I strongly recommend checking out Part 1 if you want to know how this will go.

Christmas Inheritance
Eliza Taylor and I go way back. No, not just to Neighbours (although Janae Timmins, princess of Colac, was a gift to Australian television). No, not even her struggle to say the word pineapple with a British accent in The Sleepover Club.We go right back to Pirate Islands. Which I watched predominantly because of a severe crush on Oliver Ackland who played Mars. So yeah, Eliza Taylor and I are going strong for 14 years at this point, I knew her way before her turn as the, in turn, blazingly kick-arse and heartbreaking Clarke in The 100, and I feel confident in saying this:
Christmas Inheritance may be Eliza Taylor’s breakthrough role.
You probably didn’t think you’d be reading that about the latest Netflix original Christmas movie, did you? Since I wrote my last post, A Christmas Prince has been subject to waves and waves of internet mockery. Even Netflix itself got in on the act:

So here’s my surprise for you all: Christmas Inheritance is actually good (….on the terrible Christmas romance scale), and Eliza Taylor is even better. And we get to see her in a way we never really have before.
We’re not even meant to like her character, Ellen, that much at the start. She’s pulling dumb stunts….for charity. She also pretty much feels bad about it immediately when it gets bad press, and sets about making amends.
These amends involve her going off to Small Town Somewhere to deliver an annual Christmas letter to the co-founder of her father’s company, before her father will decide on appointing her as the next CEO.
….Oh, and she can’t tell people who she is, and she has to do it on $100.
So we’re meant to judge her for not understanding the bus, and not knowing she’s sitting next to Canadian royalty Mag Ruffman, but when she tells her seatmate she’s never been on a bus, you don’t really feel like you’re watching The Simple Life. Because Eliza Taylor is so fucking charming that it’s really, really hard not to like Ellen from the start.

So that’s the thing about this movie. It’s inherently silly. The important tradition is that swapping the letters forces Ellen’s father Jim, and his co-founder Zeke (current position in the business…hazy), to see each other each year, as they physically exchange the letters going back decades, as well as the new one catching up on the goings-on. And yeah, it’s a responsibility, but sending Ellen essentially negates the whole point of the task, which is for Jim and Zeke to see each other. Ellie ends up working at Zeke’s B&B to earn her keep, and attempts to vacuum in skyscraper heels. Her fiance is a cartoon fucko.

But no matter how unlikely all the things around her are, there’s Eliza Taylor, being warm and delightful and learning that maybe giving money to the homeless is actually a good thing and also how to separate eggs. And it lifts the whole damn thing.

Also helpful is some genuine damn chemistry with Jake Lacey. He plays Jake (big stretch), who once had his heart broken by a city girl and now hangs out in Snow Falls and seemingly just keeps the entire tourism industry afloat, particularly when it comes to taxi-driving and B&B managing. Most of the men in these movies, except for the Christian Grey wannabe hot ghost in The Spirt of Christmas, are just sort of blandly nice dudes who mostly exist to fall in love with our heroine, and preferably propose to her at the end. The writers here aren’t afraid to let it run a little awkward and real, for our hero and heroine to have dumb in-jokes and to have misunderstandings about real things, like hold on, why are we about to pash when I have a fiance.
Y’know, that sort of thing.
But chemistry is really important for a romance, funnily enough. You don’t necessarily realise how nice it is to see, until you try to watch two extremely attractive people like Sam Heughan and Katie McGrath barely be able to muster a tiny spark to pass between them. So I like the chemistry, and I really enjoy watching Ellen. She’s sassy and successful but also stares at the newborn baby she’s holding like she’s Rosalie in Twilight, that creep. Jake may or may not get an instant boner at this. Shades of Matty J there.

Look, even the presence of movie-ruining Andie McDowell couldn’t ruin this dumb movie for me. Go watch it with my blessing. Netflix might subtweet you for watching it, but I won’t.

8/10

Easter egg: there’s a shot of Eliza in her Erinsborough High uniform from Neighbours in the movie, see if you can spot it!

A Wish For Christmas

So it turns out that Hallmark is almost entirely responsible for making sure fetch continues to happen for Lacey Chabert’s career, and the girl is in no less than seven holiday romances. This has led to my new headcanon revolving around her character from A Wish For Christmas trying to find a new family for Christmas each year, because she didn’t try very hard to spend time with her own in this movie. Despite one of parents being deceased.

Unfortunately, this is not, as it should be, about Lacey’s character Sara walking out on her job because the place is full of unmitigated arseholes – even her ‘friend’ at work is a complete and utter cockknuckle to her. And her boss has declared Christmas cancelled in his own life, and is having people work over Christmas.

Did I mention they work at some sort of design agency? Even if office shutdowns aren’t as common in the US as they are in Australia, their work could not be more non-essential. Having fucking Christmas Day off can be factored in to deadlines when they make their pitches! Oh goddddd there’s no just no reason for it, apart from him to see the error of his ways and for one particularly dim-witted colleague to shout ‘WOW BOSS’ when he turns up with food and graciously allows them to go home. If they have families. Fuck the single people, they can keep working until they die.

Uhhh so anyway there’s a mystical wish-granting Santa in this one, not my favourite trope, and he grants her wish to finally have some fucking balls for once in her life. There’s some satisfying chats but still. She should take this opportunity to quit her job. Toxic environments don’t stop being toxic because one person starts asserting themselves. Someone else just becomes the victim instead.

Her boss gets a competence boner for her but I just can’t get invested in this love story about how awful corporate America is and that a boss might need to be taught how to be reasonable human being by a woman who is obsessed with Christmas to the point of deep, deep, delusion. He’s gonna be heartbroken when she goes off to find a new family next year.

2/10

Merry Kissmas

A Nutcracker toy is a key plot point and the elevator is sentient.

Please just watch the trailer to cop low-rent Robert Downey Jr.’s terrible, terrible fake British accent. Eliza Taylor did better than that when she was 14 years old. Anyway, that’s Carlton, famous choreographer and Kayla’s terrible boss and fiance. We know Carlton is terrible because he doesn’t eat carbs. (I should mention that Ellen’s terrible fiance Gray in Christmas Inheritance doesn’t do sugar. What an arsehole).

Meanwhile, Kayla is an idiot with no self-esteem who emotionally unloads, several times, to an unsuspecting Santa on the street, and goes around pashing strangers in elevators. Dustin is quite used to this, as he’s regularly sexually assaulted in said elevator by Ray Barone’s mother. I don’t want to victim blame but maybe Dustin should consider taking the stairs every now and then.

Dustin runs some sort of catering business with his cousin Kim, which we know because he refers to her, when only she is present, as ‘my trusty assistant and favourite cousin’ (the exposition in this film is just so smooth it hurts) and Kayla ingratiates herself with them by baking cookies with them. Actual dialogue when they’re done:
Kayla: ‘Look at these cookies, they look so happy!’
Dustin: ‘They were made with happy!’
Kim:  ‘The real happy’s coming up…’
Apparently Kim is not talking about these simpletons getting their bone on, but about Kim and her friend from the animal shelter bullying Dustin in to adopting a dog, even though he says his lifestyle does not suit pet ownership (given all their food preparation seems to happen in the middle of his apartment, I’m tempted to agree). But anyway. Who am I to complain about a cute guy and a cute dog?

Kayla eventually half-heartedly breaks up with her fiance, so she and Dustin can have their relationship develop in a montage that seems to represent two months but is in fact two days, then she goes back to her godforsaken fiance because she has no spine, and cannot bring herself to break up with him until he is completely flagrant about the fact that he has been cheating on her the whole damn time. I’m not here for this. Everyone except Eliza, quit your job.

Anyway this movie is bad. Not just because at the end of the movie, they use the same costumes and setting from the montage in a scene that’s meant to be one year later. It’s also because of the atrocious music that seems to have been written just for the movie. The opening music talks about being ‘elevated by this Christmas kind of love’. When they pash it’s a song about being ‘under the mistletoe with you’ having ‘our first Christmas kiss’. This music, and this movie, made me consider never celebrating Christmas again.

2/10

I’ll call the series to a close there, as the only terrible Christmas romance I plan to watch from here on out is an off-Netflix movie starring the Hot Ghost. I think you know why.

Merry Christmas. Fall in love with a stranger. Dump your fiance.

Quit your job.

 

 

An Incomplete Guide To Terrible Netflix Christmas Romances Pt 1

I start this blog post knowing it will probably necessitate a Part 2. But I’m just one girl, and there are just so many shit Christmas romances on Netflix (Australia). On a recent rainy weekend, I managed to knock out four of the suckers. By the rules of these movies, if I’d been hanging out with a stranger for that amount of time, I should be ready to get engaged to that bland white dude by the time the sun set. Anyway this is kinda like my movie reviews, but in this case I only want you to watch them so we can talk about how bad they are. Know my ratings scale bears no relationship to movies that aren’t crappy made-for-TV romances. Titles link to trailers.

A Christmas Prince
The only actual Netflix production from what I can tell (the rest are from the Hallmark/Lifetime school of schmaltz). And if you think this might be reflected in say….production values, a decent script, believable accents? You’re in for a surprise. I guess all the budget went in to procuring the charming Rose McIver from iZombie (although she’s not allergic to made-for-TV-trash…I bring to you, Petals on the Wind). Amber (McIver) is a copy editor at an implausible magazine, somehow sent on the even more implausible mission to attend a press conference in the tiny European nation of Aldovia. Something something the prince has a deadline to accept the crown and he is on permanent walkabout. He turns up just in time to meet our plucky heroine, luckily.
What do you think the accent of every single person in this snowy, mountainous European country is? If you answered ‘vaguely British, I guess’ (romantic lead Ben Lamb is actually English, but still managed to make it sound fake) then you’ve probably seen one of these movies before.
There’s a lot of mysteries in this movie. Why is this royal family’s security so lax that they just merrily accept that any old American who turns up two weeks early is clearly Princess Emily’s tutor? Why are the royalty in these movies so unwilling to do their fucking jobs, which is really just turn up places, smile and shake hands? (this is gonna come up again, sorry). Does Emily actually end up doing any school work over the course of this entire movie? I don’t think they give out degrees in mischievous matchmaking. Also she’s smarter than Amber at maths, and yet Amber’s going to get to be the fuckin’ queen because of some dumb female succession rules (spoilers, I guess? Come on now).  And why does Prince Richard look so much like this guy?

The Christmas Prince actually received my lowest rating, but it was also the first one I watched. I guess I had some warming up to do before I surrendered all attachment to logic (I watched The Room before The Spirit of Christmas, so I was fully off the deep end by that time).

3/10 for so much additional implausibility (wait til you get to the result of Richard’s evil cousin’s schemes, y’all) that I can’t share without spoilers.

Once Upon a Holiday
More dirtbag royalty, oh my god. They didn’t look far for the fucking names in this one, either. Princess Katherine of Montsaurai (Mont Sore Eye) has an aunt named Margaret, an old family friend named George, and meets an old bloke named Harry who may or may not be Santa, or a wizard, I’m not really sure but he can make people disappear and there’s not really any comment on it.  Anyway, Princess Katie is also not a big fan of her minimal responsibilities, or her aunt. Said aunt probably should be a Princess too, given she seems to have been the sister of the king, but it’s all extremely unclear, and in the end Margaret seems to act as a personal assistant and excuse-for-Katie-maker.
Dirtbag Katie sees her opportunity to piss off on a trip to ‘New York’ (I don’t remember any establishing shots that suggested this couldn’t be literally any city in America), so she steals some clothes that were being donated to charity. She runs in to Jack while being completely unable to function in a big city, because apparently sending her to the best universities in the world did not involve her handling money, or  learning how not to casually leave your possessions where they can be stolen. What it DID get her is an inexplicable American accent.
Jack is another classic bland white man, who had some hot shot career and then wanted to work with his hands as a carpenter or some shit. His ex-wife dumped him because ‘she didn’t sign on for a guy who works with power tools’, but I wonder if it was maybe because he’s a gullible idiot. Well, he’s found his perfect match in this terrible liar, who pauses while searching for a fake surname at a holiday party (she settles on ‘Holiday’), and instead of implying she’s ever travelled internationally, tells him she saw an art piece (exhibited in Milan) in a book. It’s a good thing they’re such a perfect match, because at the end he suggests they ‘spend all of their Christmases together’ after legitimately three days of acting like fugitives from justice.

4/10 I was going to leave it at A Christmas Prince but I had to find out what the ‘joys of a normal life’ were that Katie would discover, because to me normal life is taking out the bins and paying the bills, and I’d much prefer to be a princess. Nothing that happened in this movie resembled normal life, anywhere, especially not in ‘New York’. Apart from maybe getting robbed.

A Holiday Engagement
Okay I can’t believe I have to do this but warning: that trailer is basically the whole movie.
Have I mentioned that I read quite a lot of romance novels? It has occurred to me that part of my warm feeling towards this movie is just because it uses one of my favourite tropes – the fake relationship. Made slightly more complicated in this scenario because David is pretending to be a real person – Hillary’s now-ex fiance Jason. So much room for shenanigans!
This is a slightly older one, a special little slice of 2011 which you can date pretty exactly due to the presence of Haylie Duff as the social-climbing sister of Hillary (ha). Golly. Haylie Duff. They really did spend an unreasonable amount of time trying to make fetch happen with that one (she got her very own Terrible Christmas Romance two years later!).
I will say that this one is exactly what you expect, whether you watched the spoileriffic trailer or not, with Hillary’s overbearing Mom (Shelley Long) eventually learning maybe she can quit being terrifying enough for her daughter to think it’s an okay idea to invite a stranger in to their home, and everyone realising Real Jason is garbage, but it really gets by on its leads. I have a bizarre affection for Bonnie Somerville, despite my main association with her being Rachel, Sandy’s co-worker on The OC who tries to seduce him. She can actually fucking act, which is bloody rare for these things, and has some nice chemistry with Jordan Bridges who plays David.

7/10 But I need to deduct a point because this movie is mostly set at Thanksgiving. Luckily Shelley Long starts setting up for Christmas straight-up the day after Thanksgiving, doesn’t she know it’s bad luck not to wait til December? Are you a shopping mall, Shelley Long?
(The internet tells me this is an Australian thing? I will say none of the Americans on my Instagram feed seemed to put them up before we hit December).

The Spirit of Christmas
Are

You

Kidding

Me?

10/10 for this guy’s fucking face, let’s all go home.

On the narrative side, my new crush up there is a corporeal not-ghost (for 12 days of the year, we don’t really know what he does the rest of the time but presumably it’s mostly ghost-y) who can also disappear and re-appear at will. This movie really doesn’t give a fuck about the rules of ghosts, any more than the others cared about the rules of royalty, getting to know a person for an adequate amount of time, or basic common sense. He took a blow to the head that killed him in 1920 and comes back every year acting like Christian Grey. Except with no BDSM, just with really proper speech and a cranky attitude. The movie only finds one excuse for him to take his shirt off, which is a bit half-arsed. The fact that he likes to be alone in his old house (rather than having to deal with our ‘heroine’, who’s mostly insufferable) is the movie’s reason for him not knowing anything about mobile phones and referring to them as ‘communications devices’.
The spooky mystery element – basically, who dun killed him, and is it stopping him from passing on – is a nice little bonus on top of what would be a pretty ordinary ‘oh you want to bone a ghost? Well that’s fine because he has a body’ story.
I think the best part of this movie is even though it wants us to think all lawyers and the general profession of lawyering is a bit evil and shit (so much time pressure!), she doesn’t stop being a lawyer at the end. I’ll let you guess about the boning.

My rating as above stands.

‘Battle of the Sexes’: The Victorian Values Review

A word of warning to my fellow Aussies: we’re going to have a pretty unique perspective on this movie. And if you care about any queer person in your life, you’re going to find it effects you. Because:
a) We’re currently going through a non-binding postal survey that has essentially turned in to a national referendum on the way LGBTQI people live their lives.

b) Margaret Court. Just….Margaret Court.

I’ve got to tell you, I had to do a bit of a Wikipedia dive on this one. Margaret Court was never on my radar (even though she has an Arena named after her, my bad), so making her a villain of the piece seemed a little….obvious, after her comments in May this year. But given this movie was filmed over a year before that, I wanted to see what else may have informed that decision. Turns out Margaret Court was raised Roman Catholic and then went full Pentecostal around the period the film is set in, became a Minister in her own church and has used that platform to speak out about gay marriage (and a bunch of other things). Safe to say, she well and truly had form before her comments this year. I’ve heard stories of audiences booing her appearance, however, despite the Lido loading us up on Pimms at today’s preview, my crowd mostly kept it in.

(As an aside, I am so glad they got an Australian actress to play Court, although strangely Jessica McNamee did seem to slip in to a trans-Pacific accent sometimes).

Battle of the Sexes is undoubtedly a story about Billie Jean King, a story about sexism, homophobia, fear, and strength. This is not Steve Carell’s story to tell, and as such he takes a bit of a back seat. I mean, his character is played as such a loser that he sleeps in the back seat of a car. And his son’s couch. Yeah, Bobby Riggs is not doing great at the start of this story. And, with real life being a spoiler again, he ain’t doing too crash hot at the end, either. But he does have an colossally smug period in between beating Margaret Court and taking on King. Carell effortlessly slips in to Riggs’s bravado and showmanship – and no-one that’s ever scene The Office could doubt this.

King is surrounded by a colourful cast of characters as she establishes what will become the Women’s Tennis Association. It kicks off with the Virginia Slims Invitational and nine players, including King and her good friend Rosie Salas. Rosie, played by Natalie Morales, ends up not only winning the tour, she also finds herself  calling the match between King and Riggs, with some oafish white dude holding on to her neck in a way that has never not given me the heebie-jeebies. Also helping establish the Virginia Slims International is Gladys Heldman, played to acerbic perfection by Sarah Silverman. Heldman is shown to be alongside King at the moment that spurns her to move in to a new realm – a pay dispute with a tournament organiser – however their relationship is a little vague. Wikipedia tells me they were essentially colleagues, but the movie had me convinced Heldman was King’s manager, until the moment King asks her husband Larry to tell Riggs she’s ready to bring it on. Whatever their relationship, Silverman trying to shove cigarettes in the hands of these athletes because of the sponsorship deal she’s locked down is a hoot.

King’s relationship with Heldman isn’t the only one the movie futzes. At the centre of this story is King’s queer identity, her struggle as a married woman coming to terms with her sexuality, and meeting a woman who could change everything (all the while being observed by the judgey judgey eye of Margaret Court, and casually being cheered on by seemingly-not-at-all-in-the-closet Alan Cumming, assisting the team on wardrobe).  King meets Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough) in a hairdresser’s chair, and what follows is a brief but intense love affair, clearly seen and comprehended by King’s husband Larry (Austin Stowell). Billie clearly knows what she wants, and the impossibility of having it. The movie ends on a gentle note, with Cummings’ character telling her that one day things will change and they will be free to love who they love. The postscript on the movie tells us that eventually King did move on from her marriage to Larry, and began a long-term relationship with a woman named Ilana Kloss. She and Larry are still buds.

What the movie fails to mention is that King and Barnett (who is still present at the end of the movie) were in a relationship for many years after this. In fact, King was only dragged out of the closet against her will in 1981 when Barnett sued her for ‘palimony’.

On the theme of identity struggles, this movie really doesn’t know what it wants to be. It contains many clear dramatic elements, in King’s struggle with her sexuality and in the battle for women to establish their place in a male-dominated arena. Hidden Figures was somehow much more accomplished at balancing this with comedic elements. Battle of the Sexes takes a broader approach. Fred Armisen is there as the man shilling bogus vitamin pills (and possibly speed?) to Riggs. Riggs’s therapist, who’s there to help him with his gambling problems, has a blackjack debt to him. These ridiculous elements certainly circle around Riggs (altogether laughable himself), and it makes it incredibly difficult to mesh in to King’s dramatic storyline. Here we have a Joke Person up against a Real Person.

But of course, these movie isn’t just a fumbled mesh of comedy and drama. Even though it’s a movie supposedly about tennis, the ‘sports’ part felt reasonably absent until the last act – the match between King and Riggs. And this is where I suspect we find there’s actually a pretty decent sports movie hidden in here. Because the promotion has made no attempt to hide the outcome (and why would they?), but we can feel real stakes and real tension. As someone who is not aggressively in to tennis, it reminded me of just how thrilling the game can be to watch. And when you can know the result and still get that invested? That’s some pretty good film making. Someone in my audience clapped when King got a key shot. The woman next to me cried when she won. I don’t think the Pimms had a lot of influence on this, either.

Do I need to tell you that Emma Stone is fantastic? That she shows vulnerability and strength in equal measure and you will want to high-five the heck out of her while gently reminding her that her husband seems like a really nice guy? That she will make you wish you had witty bon mots and not just pure blinding rage next time someone says something sexist to you? And that she will make you ache, ache for everyone who sees the cruelty and the judgement surrounding them and quietly retreats in to secrecy, waiting for the world to change.

If only it had changed a little more.

‘The Beguiled’: The Victorian Values Review

The second Victorian Values review is probably excessively-informed for a movie that has not even been officially released in Australian cinemas.  I knew I wanted to see this movie from the second it was described by Robbie Collin thusly:

Sofia Coppola transforms The Beguiled from eager, lurid romp to witheringly elegant fuckboy takedown. Loved it. #Cannes70

— Robbie Collin (@robbiereviews) May 24, 2017

It’s what we’re all here for, right? The teaser trailer above just reaffirmed that for me (I suggest avoiding other trailers if possible – I know it’s a remake but the later trailers give a lot of the game away). So I booked in for an advanced screening at one of my favourite Melbourne cinemas, The Lido, and then won tickets to a screening four days earlier. Yep, I saw this movie twice in one week. Now I’m here to tell you why you should go see it.

The movie is set in Virginia during the Civil War. Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman) has kept her girls’ school open for a handful of students and a teacher (Kirsten Dunst) who have nowhere better to go. When one of the girls finds an injured Yankee soldier (Colin Farell) in the woods adjoining the school, their lives are turned upside down.

Possibly my favourite part of this movie was the visceral reactions it inspired. Partly I think the marketing has worked incredibly well (despite some spoiler-heaviness in the later trailers) – everyone at the first screening had somehow been primed to loathe Colin Farrell. Long, long before the movie gave them any real reason to do so. I have never seen a declaration of love be met with a cinema full of scoffs, but there’s a first time for everything. Be warned, many of the other audible reactions were to some rather loving shots of wounds. I’m sensitive to that sort of stuff so I used some rather judicious looking-at-the-back-of-that-person’s-head-over-there, but even the sounds were (realistically) revolting.

Next, this movie is tight. Even if your local cinema is indulgent with the trailers, you should be in and out in two hours. I’d accuse the film of having no filler, but at the second screening I was considering taking a count of the number of near-identical shots of the porch at the fictional Farnsworth Seminary that feature. The many exterior shots do however do the job of establishing the near-oppressive atmosphere of this micro-world. The hothouse environment is emphasised by a constant background soundtrack of booming combat on the nearby front, cicadas singing and frogs croaking. In this environment, we find female sexuality blooming in the unexpected presence of an injured soldier.

While the movie does have a darkly comedic tone (often relating back to female sexuality, competition, and power), I found Elle Fanning’s teen temptress broad in a way that did not fit in to the tone of the film at first. She lacks the depth hinted at by the more experienced actresses. On my second viewing, I felt that her character fit quite well in to Coppola’s oeuvre – after all, the disaffected, languorous flirt is not a world away from the character Dunst was playing for Coppola eighteen years ago (my apologies if you were just made deeply aware of your own mortality) in The Virgin Suicides. Nonetheless, given the effort this film makes to tell the story from the female perspective (unlike the 1971 original), it would have been rewarding to see more from this character.

Just a nice casual dinner

One of the things I discussed with a friend after the first screening is the renewing revelation of Nicole Kidman. How somehow finding that you enjoy her work is surprising, over and over again. It seems that she has somehow been shoehorned in to the wrong roles over the years, but is at her best nowadays when she can put forth a steeliness which is greatly used here (I also loved her brittle turn in Lion). As the protective headmistress she wages an internal battle between her urge to see the enemy soldier out the house, and the mounting desire to have him stay. Three years in to a war is a long time, after all. Kirsten Dunst also deserves credit for her turn as the teacher Edwina. In her, every woman can see the part of herself who falls for the classic fuckboy charms (and we can all acknowledge Colin Farrell is annoyingly charming, yet the dangerous side of Corporal John McBurney comes as no surprise when it emerges).

All I wanted to know when I saw the trailer above is what those ‘vengeful bitches’ had done to him, but I’m not going to let you in on that. This is a movie to immerse yourself in. How an atmospherically languid film manages to ratchet up the tension in the way it does is masterful. I would strongly suggest not watching the original film or the latter trailers before going to see it – the audience reactions (including my own!) as the film takes its twists and turns, enhanced by the dark comedy, were all I needed to know that this film is best seen unspoilered. But given the main competition at the Australian box office for The Beguiled will be a teenage boy slinging webs, and a young man driving a baby around (presumably – terrible name), don’t you just want to see a fuckboy taken down for once?

‘My Cousin Rachel’: The Victorian Values Review

I’m sure it will shock you to learn, but this blog has not been so very successful that promoters are throwing preview screening tickets at me. No, I went to see My Cousin Rachel yesterday on my own dime. I thought that given it’s on a somewhat limited release, people might be more willing to go to their local movie complex to see if The Mummy is really as bad as people say it is (it will be) rather than haul their backsides to their local arthouse or indie cinema to watch a movie that, based on the trailer, may or may not be about incest. This was enough to inspire me to do a little write-up.

Based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier (Rebecca, The Birds), My Cousin Rachel tells the story of Philip and Rachel, the widowed wife of the man who raised him. After Philip’s cousin Ambrose dies unexpectedly in foreign lands, Philip immediately suspects his new wife Rachel, a woman he has only heard about in letters. However when she turns up on his doorstep, she is far from the schemer he expected. Philip’s dangerous obsession with Rachel grows, isolating him from those that care about him, with ultimately tragic consequences.

Finally, Sam Claflin has an opportunity to be less than charming. In fact, many times during the course of My Cousin Rachel, all you want to do is slap him upside the head. As Philip’s longterm family lawyer and guardian, Iain Glen must have felt very comfortable being subjected to yelling and tantrums while his well-meaning advice is consistently ignored. Just add some dragons and he’s back in Westeros.

“Calm your farm, Phileesi”

For a film about passion and obsession, My Cousin Rachel in the end is quite sexless and chaste. While Philip and Rachel eventually develop an intimate relationship, it is all implied on screen. It’s a weakness of the movie, to some extent. It is possible the choice was made to secure a favourable rating for the film – in Australia it is rated PG for mild themes (presumably revolving around Philip’s proclivity for trashing furniture in a rage), violence, and occasional coarse language. But while it’s not suggested that every movie must become 9½ Weeks, it seems a waste of two incredibly charismatic leads to not explore this aspect further. There’s no real need for a film like this to be family-friendly – I was the only person under the age of 50 at an opening weekend screening.

Rachel Weisz has frequently played the kind of woman you could fall in love with at the drop of the hat (hello Evie in the far superior version of The Mummy), but her femme fatale role as Rachel adds layers to this. As any good noir woman, she has an air of mystery that draws in our hapless hero. However, she is less of a seductress and more of an oddball. Not just because of her ‘foreign’ obsessions with tisanes and potions, but her mannerisms are coltish and nervous at first, despite the her ongoing ability to charm the community around her. In the end, Rachel remains a mystery to viewers. Many questions are left unanswered. This is not strictly a weak point – and it may be expanded upon more in the book, which I have not yet read – but leaves a lot of room for discussion afterwards about the potential motivations of her character.

Weirdly, I walked out of this movie desperate for a cup of tea

Apart from the heavy noir influences, the film also has a strong Gothic tone. As the lines between reality, delusion and fantasy begin to blur, the walls of this huge candlelit manor seem to close in. The battle for Philip’s soul takes place in the light-filled village, with sensible family friend and presumed intended Louise  (Holliday Grainger) begging him to see sense in drawing rooms, churches and sun-filled porches, while in the hidden corners of the Ashley estate, Philip steals in to Rachel’s room by moonlight to perform a boyish seduction.

It is rare in modern times to see a period film that focuses on the dangers of passion and obsession. Most of the world would rather see a nice neat Austen adaptation than a Brontë, but films like My Cousin Rachel introduce an ambiguity – of motivation, of resolution – that television has arguably become much better at than cinema. It’s refreshing to walk out of a screening with questions, with much to discuss afterwards, rather than just observe the quality of a particular fight scene (although, please, let us all discuss the Amazons in Wonder Woman and how we’d like to be one when we grow up) or use of CGI. If you decide to see the film, please come back here and let me know, because I’m dying to talk to someone about it!