T/S: John Hughes vs. Judd Apatow

Ha, basically the woman in all of these is a Maguffin!

yeah.

"Teen comedies" have never done much for me. The teen age is a wretched and somber time of life.

a-ha. see, i think most people who have a problem with bueller are upset by the notion that for some/many people it is neither wretched nor somber, and they pretend that the refusal to deny this is right-wing.

no, it's just libertine.

nabisco OTM. While other directors ridicule the women they can't help but turn into goddesses, Apatow genuinely believes in them; his male characters might actually consider sacrificing buddydom for it, albeit reluctantly.

most otm line in Knocked Up was when Rogen said, of Rudd, "look at him! don't you just want to grab that face and kiss it?" or something like that

half the guys in the audience chuckled uncomfortably at this; they all seemed to recognize that they've fantasized about making out with their best friends at least once.

I thought the character played by Apatow's wife in Knocked Up was pretty good, actually, it might've come off a little shrill/unflattering at points but in the 2nd half I feel like it really gave a real, honest viewpoint about what a wife has to put up with in even a fairly stable marriage and made Rudd's character look more like an asshole than her.

Well if yr best friend were PAUL RUDD, hell yes --

I almost feel bad criticizing Apatow about the airy symbolic female leads, though, since it's only the relative depth of his male characters that makes you notice this! Your average comedy woman is surely worse than Apatow's on this front, but nobody is all like "hey, Mary Jane in Half Baked is just a two-dimensional symbol used to make Dave Chapelle decide to stop smoking weed!"

using the woman as the Maguffin is potentially extra-annoying in a movie that involves pregnancy, I think. I saw this movie with a friend who was really annoyed by that, which made me realize that I had preemptively adjusted my expectations fairly low for the Heigl character beforehand. (I still think she did a good job.)

the Leslie Mann character was a sharper characterization than Heigl's, yeah. I love the scene where she freaks out on Rudd after discovering his fantasy baseball meeting.

it's only the relative depth of his male characters that makes you notice this!

not really. it's more, hmm, 90 minutes have gone by and this pregnant lady hasn't touched her belly, all weirded out by their being a thing in it yet that makes you notice it.

Granted that pregnancy ups the ante on that one significantly, but how do you think this would compare with, like, Nine Months, or something? (I had to look that up on IMDB to even be reminded that Julianne Moore was the woman in it.)

I feel like Apatow's nods to pregnancy as an actual experience rather than a plot device were pretty perfunctory and about a pregnant body as experienced from the outside rather than the inside, cf. Heigl freaking out about being "huge."

I really do like this movie, but I get why people I know had major problems with it.

xpost okay, fair enough. I'm holding Apatow to a higher standard because I think he's better than who the fuck ever directed Nine Months.

if Julianne Moore was my wife, you can bet I'd be playing fantasy football every night.

I don't know what would happen if you actually countered that mentality with substantive stuff from the other side, about the female characters' thoughts and failings and insecurities -- just having them in there might complicate things to the point where the comedy becomes not so funny at all, but it'd certainly be interesting.

this might very well be true.

It was Christopher Columbus, so ... yeah. That "higher standard" was all I really meant -- all the stuff Apatow can do really well leaves a big obvious stink around the things he's just par at.

xpost - It's weird to wonder whether substantive character stuff on BOTH ends can be fitted into rom-coms! The answer should totally be yes, and yet it seems difficult enough that people mostly tend to succeed from one point of view or the other. We need some sort of thread to find and list romantic comedies that do the best job of splitting the viewpoint.

we had a version of this conversation in the Chicago thread and Eazy suggested Before Sunset, but that's not a comedy. I think the comedy part is what makes it hard, because so much of comedy trades on traditional gender stuff.

(P.S. Julianne Moore film I must now see: sLaughterhouse II (1988) ... aka Abbatoir d'amusement: La vengeance du Pigsby)

It's weird to wonder whether substantive character stuff on BOTH ends can be fitted into rom-coms!

Sturges came closest, no? Within the context of farce, of course.

well, Sturges is great, but his comedies depend on a gendered social framework that doesn't obtain anymore. I'm interested in movies trying to do this now.

(I mean, I'm totally willing to accept David Denby's thesis that female characters in classic Hollywood movies were often "better" than characters like Heigl's. The content of the examples he cited, though, was inevitably a strong-willed woman running up against the constraints of a sexist society. And then he seemed to be critiquing characters like Heigl's because she had her shit together, basically. The problem he wasn't quite articulating was, "I don't know what a strong female character looks like when she's not being directly belittled by a sexist dude.")

or "I don't know what a strong female character looks like who doesn't have Joan Crawford linebacker pads."

haha i may get shouted down for this but woody allen has, in the past, written a couple v complex and interesting lady characters in films that could be considered rom-coms

no, that's fair! before he became really mean, Allen was good at this stuff, partially because he just put his issues with women on the table. the movies of his that are good at it tend to be kind of melancholy along with the funny, though?

I mean, Knocked Up is kind of melancholy along with the funny, too.

yeah there might be an inverse relationship between the complexity/realism of *both* characters and the sort of 'sweetness' of the romance?

surely there are examples of romantic comedies with flawed/realistic female protagonists and shallow/glorified males but i can't really think of too many off the top of my head.

maybe this is not a good example, but I really love the moment in Manhattan where Allen's character scolds Keaton's for working on a novelization of a movie. he says something like, "you're much too brilliant for this." I've never articulated why that moment seems moving, but it's a funny mix of condescension and respect that seems real.

"Teen comedies" have never done much for me. The teen age is a wretched and somber time of life.

a-ha. see, i think most people who have a problem with bueller are upset by the notion that for some/many people it is neither wretched nor somber, and they pretend that the refusal to deny this is right-wing.

I think I agree with this. I will certainly allow that, for a large number of people, teenage years suck in so many ways. I was fortunate - past 13, things were pretty cool. Some downs, lots more ups, and then I was in college, which flew by in a blur of far too much of everything. At 30, I can look back and say "Well, if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn't if I had the perspective that I have now then. It just wouldn't be that much fun compared to my life at 30." But if forced to choose b/t death and repeating high school? I'd repeat high school. Sure. It wasn't THAT bad.

Does this mean that my perspective on teenageness is right-wing? Hmmm.

The thing that most weirded me out about the Denby is that he talked specifically about the organization of some of those classics, where it's often the buttoned-down man coming across the feisty / flighty / free-spirited woman, and the typical movie result is that he's drawn into her "fun" -- and then he really scooted around the way the new movies he's talking about gender-reverse that, with the immature slacker comedy-fun guy meeting the respectable, adult, put-together woman. The thing is that it's not a straight reversal, because (a) the result is that the man becomes buttoned-down and adult, and (b) it's still entirely from the male point of view, which is the part that really marginalizes the women: when both your wacky comedy qualities and your central POV are situated with the man, that's when the woman becomes really vestigial.

I mean, I think Denby's so comfortable with woman-as-vestigial he doesn't even notice it. /ad hominem attack

Or maybe it IS a straight reversal:

man ==> meets feisty, interesting woman ==> becomes more fun
man ==> meets together, responsible woman ==> becomes more adult

Otherwise the straight reversal would be more, like, Failure to Launch.

In any case, modern examples of the first description are known as "her kookiness will save me" movies and include in their number Eternal Sunshine, that Braff/Paquin horor -- oh, Garden State, and a whole load of other movies that come out every year.

xxp

ugh, Braff is obsessed with female kookiness. that's my least favorite trope ever. to be fair, Denby was also talking about movies like His Girl Friday, which aren't organized that way.

Barefoot in the Park vs. Dharma and Greg

it's been a while since i saw it but i think whaserface in eternal sunshine's kookiness was a little more examined than natalie portman wearing a helmet and making a sound nobody's ever made before

yeah, I meant to say. kookiness like in Eternal Sunshine and Annie Hall is qualitatively different than mfing Garden State. so much so that it deserves a more dignified classification than "kookiness."

Well, I think whatserface in Eternal was actually MENTALLY ILL, so that's a bit more...everything than Portman, yes. But still the same trope.

Mentally ill? No way. Alcoholic, probably, but she's no more mentally ill than the Joel character with his jealous fits.

Okay, I will put some cards on the table and just ask if this is maybe just very male of me: I think I at least prefer the mentality of these male-POV films -- where there is some sense of wonder over the woman's kookiness/adultness that winds up changing the character -- to a lot of female-aimed romcoms, where the male lead seems to just fit a type, and doesn't change the character except by more or less being a high-quality romantic consumer good that she attains. (This surely has to do with most rom-coms aimed at women still being made by men who are maybe guessing/condescending about what women like/want.)

P.S. OMG if you want to talk about kooky-savior sub-Garden State trainwrecks, did anyone see ELIZABETHTOWN??? I could watch this movie forever, it's so mixed-up and bizarre, like 15 minutes of a fairly good Crowe movie scattered amid 100 minutes of cringing awfulness.

a-ha. see, i think most people who have a problem with bueller are upset by the notion that for some/many people it is neither wretched nor somber, and they pretend that the refusal to deny this is right-wing.

gabbneb, my teenage years were neither wretched nor somber. Ferris is a cute asshole. While I know many teenagers (lots of my friends at the time) loved FB because its protagonist was a cute asshole who jerked everyone around, including the best friend he only half-heartedly cares about (I always found it weird that it's Sloan who cradles his head and actually tries to talk to him while Ferris munches thoughtfully on Oreos), it's a state of mind that's enfeebling and increasingly self-centered. That's one version of Reaganism.

I would argue that "her kookiness will save me," while an element of the Joel-Clementine relationship in Eternal Sunshine, is not ultimately what the movie is about.

what female-aimed romcoms are we talking about? the ones I like probably do a less-good characterization of the dude than the woman, but I don't think he becomes a consumer good.

"her kookiness will crash my car"

The 'it's Reaganism' stuff has officially been pushed to the limit.

Okay full disclosure: I hate movies (and books, for that matter) about people's mental states, so I don't see a lot of these or pay very much attention. So yeah sorry, I'm sort of just throwing out ideas w/o much follow-up.

Uh Nabs, I might be more inclined to agree w/ you if "my kookiness will save him" wasn't one of the most useless Real Life directives ever.

Male writer-directors assume kookiness denotes depth.

do you guys know the theory that ferris and camron are two sides of the same person? the one thing i remember from first year physics

P.P.S. The award for Most Vestigial Significant Other in Recent Light Entertainment totally goes to the boyfriend in The Devil Wears Prada.

(one sec while I think of examples, horseshoe -- I might be misled here by seeing less adult female-aimed rom-coms than teenage ones, where it makes slightly more sense for the guy to just be a distant hunk-figure)

do you guys know the theory that ferris and camron are two sides of the same person?

http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/b/j/kerry_edwards_dumb_dumber.jpg

the one that's popping into my head is that one from years ago with Hope Davis, Next Stop Wonderland? which is way more about her than dude, yeah. why can't I think of more? in theory it's a female-aimed genre, right?

Some of you dingalings are possibly missing there was such a thing as CULTURAL Reaganism -- ie, how '80s American movies all seemed to end with Eddie Murphy or John Candy smiling in freeze-frame.

And now, folks seem only to get excited about American movies that are (to one degree or another) big-screen TV shows.

I hate movies (and books, for that matter) about people's mental states

I'm not sure what this means...? I mean, you could make an argument that anything character-driven is "about people's mental states."