Tag: Fine Romance Friday

Leaving on a Jet Plane

One of my cat nips is when characters in a book or film debate the meaning of another work of art. Think 500 Days of Summer (2009), in which the narrator tells us that Tom misunderstands the ending of The Graduate (1967), while his love interest, Summer, does not. Or Tiffany Reisz’s The Siren in which Nora and Zach tussle over whether O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” is romantic or terrifying. Or KJ Charles’s A Seditious Affair in which Dominic wrestles with the meaning of several William Blake poems, demonstrating that he’s compatible with Silas and that he’s finally gotten over his first love, Richard.

And any conversation about this kind of intertextuality would likely include When Harry Met Sally (1989). In director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron’s friends to lovers romantic comedy, the titular Harry and Sally constantly jaw about pop culture. From board games to journalists, museums to music, the film’s script bursts with the characters’ opinions about other texts. But the reference that comes up multiple times, and reveals the most about the characters, is Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942).

Seven years ago–how is that possible?–I wrote a brief post about Casablanca, one of the primo romantic dramas of the Hollywood studio era. The love triangle between Rick, the cynical saloon owner; Victor, the idealistic resistance organizer; and Ilsa, the woman torn between them, has been endlessly parsed in our living rooms and our pop culture. But–spoiler alert!–while Ilsa might end up with Victor, when Casablanca pops up in other works, it seems like most people are on Rick’s side.

What does the cultural preference for Rick say about us? While there are some structural reasons why people might find Rick more sympathetic, I think the real issue is that American culture has tended to celebrate the kind of hard, cynical, and even cruel masculinity Rick embodies rather than Victor’s restrained, gentle, and more idealistic mode. So I’d like to suggest, as I did on Twitter yesterday, that Ilsa made the right choice and that Victor would be a better and more supportive partner than Rick.

Continue reading “Leaving on a Jet Plane” →

Space on Screen

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) is the first science fiction film. After all, the sky is the original cinematic experience: the lights go up and come down; the moon and constellations change; the colors shift, fade, and intensify; and the weather provides drama and tension. Staring at the sky in night or day is an emotional, humanizing experience. It emphasizes how small you are in the face of the universe. Thus it only makes sense that one of the first subjects for narrative cinema would be the desire to explore what’s up there.

(Digression: I, like most babies of the 80s and 90s, came to know Melies’ work because of the Smashing Pumpkin’s video for “Tonight, Tonight,” which remains most excellent.)

covers of four movies: hidden figures, the dish, the astronaut wives club, and apollo 13

What I want to think about today, though, isn’t films such as A Trip to the Moon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Contact, or Armageddon, which concern themselves with space in an entirely imaginative or fictional way, but instead with those that attempt to tell the “true” story of human space exploration.

For the sake of conciseness, I’m going to limit myself to The Right Stuff (1983), Apollo 13 (1995), The Dish (2000)*, The Astronaut Wives Club (2015)**, Hidden Figures (2016), First Man (2018)*, and Apollo 11 (2019)**, arguing that while these films are about humans leaving earth, neither the films nor the history they represent successfully abandon earth’s baggage, specifically gender and race.

Continue reading “Space on Screen” →

Trope-tastic Musicals

Elisabeth Lane (who has started a fantastic YouTube romance channel!) initiated a conversation on Twitter recently about the books that converted you to genre romance. Not necessarily the first romances you read, but the ones that convinced you that romance was awesome. I hazarded some guesses when she asked it, but as I pondered her question more, I wondered whether my Ur-romances were books at all.

I was in my late 20s when I started reading romance. Romance novels were so precisely what I needed at that moment, I inhaled them by the bushel. It felt as if I’d been reading around romance my entire life, and now I had finally discovered the good stuff, a genre that could deliver the purest version of what I’d been seeking. But maybe the sense of familiarity, of ah, at last, that I felt when I started reading romance came from the overlap between the tropes in romance and those in movie musicals.

As a child, I’d been as devoted to musicals as I am to genre romance today. Musicals taught me about introspection, harmony, and female friends with whom you can dance in your bloomers if you’re ever carried off by a family of mountain men (see below). They’re unabashedly sentimental, almost always have happy endings, and frequently contain a (or sometimes several) central romance(s).

This list isn’t a best of or even a set of recommendations. It’s skewed by what I watched and listened to as a kid in the early to mid 90s. It’s very white, almost entirely heteronormative, and more than a few of these films are seriously problematic. But putting it together convinced me that my origins as a reader and writer of romance are in Hollywood movie musicals.

Spoilers ahead.

Continue reading “Trope-tastic Musicals” →

A Fine Romance Friday: First Man

This is neither Friday nor is the film in question precisely a romance, but today’s subject is Damien Chazelle’s First Man (2018). I’ve wanted to watch it for months, and I finally had a few free hours to snag it from Redbox.

In the gap between its release and when I managed to see it, First Man received a critical reaction I’d characterize as positive but reserved and “only” four Academy Award nominations. So I went into it a bit apprehensive. If you enjoy what Genevieve Turner and I are doing with Fly Me to the Moon, however, I can almost guarantee you’ll adore First Man. While I have a few complaints, it’s visually stunning and a different take on the astronaut movie subgenre.

Continue reading “A Fine Romance Friday: First Man” →

Rom Coms Where the Wrong Choice is Right

Ahem…this is going to be controversial. But what follows is a brief list of romantic comedies and dramas in which the “wrong choice” love interest is far more deserving than the “right choice” one.

Casablanca (1942)

Perhaps the originator of this trope, Elsa was right to stay with Victor, but Rick is Rick, and you know she’ll always wonder.

The Sound of Music (1965)

What can I say except McSweeney’s convinced me: Captain Von Trapp would have been happy married to Baroness Schrader.

Pretty in Pink (1986)

Let me say I think the “she should have ended up with Duckie” stuff is overplayed (see Jon Cryer thoughtfully arguing against that here), but I don’t think there’s any doubt Duckie is a better realized character than Blane. I’ve always wondered if twenty years later, Duckie and Andie might make a go of it.

You’ve Got Mail (1998)

I always pretend this movie is centered on Patricia (Parker Posey) and that after her boyfriend (Tom Hanks) dumps her to pursue the children’s bookstore owner (Meg Ryan) whose business he destroyed, Patricia goes on to take over New York publishing and find love with someone worthy of her.

Enchanted (2007)

At the level of satire, this movie works for me. At the level of romance…no, definitely not. Idina Menzel’s Nancy in particular deserves much better than she gets. The idea that driven career women secretly want to become princesses? No, not so much.

Letters to Juliet (2010)

This film could make the list twice, first because the B-plot (the romance between Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero) is infinitely more interesting and charming than the A-plot, but also because Gael Garcia Bernal is a metric ton more attractive/beguiling than Christopher Egan.

ETA: I deliberately omitted Twilight not wanting to reopen Edward vs. Jacob…but yeah, Team Jacob. All the way.

A Fine Romance Friday: Jackie

So it’s neither Friday, nor is this a romance. But since this is the label I use to write about film, here we go.

In 2016, Pablo Lorrain released a biopic about Jackie Kennedy called, creatively, Jackie. Focused on the period immediately surrounding JFK’s assassination, it’s a vehicle for Natalie Portman, but it’s also a meditation on history, gender, and grief.

Now I might be sort of interested in the mid-century. Okay, maybe a lot interested (exhibit A). So when the trailer dropped, I was SO EXCITED, but then the reviews trickled out. While they were generally positive (88% at Rotten Tomatoes), there was some prominent dissent, and I’d characterize them as muted on the whole. Therefore I didn’t see it until now. But I found it to be one of the most absorbing films in recent memory, and I have a few thoughts which I’ll drop below.

Continue reading “A Fine Romance Friday: Jackie” →

A Fine Romance Friday: To Catch a Thief

I’ve become a stress wraith. It’s the beginning of summer, I still have two weeks to work before my kids are done with school, I’ve been writing more than I have in years…and I’m feel like I’m about to shatter. It’s the situation in the world, I know, and looming deadlines and goals (all self-imposed), but my nerves are raw, exposed, and frayed.

When I get like this, it’s hard to read. I can’t seem to make my mind to settle long enough to digest prose. Even concentrating on a movie is hard because the things I should be doing keep exploding into my head. I find myself re-reading and re-watching both because those acts require less concentration but because I know what I’m getting into. The emotional pleasures of the re-watch are guaranteed.

So when I saw it was on Netflix, I instantly pressed play on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 romantic heist To Catch a Thief.

If somehow you haven’t seen it, our story is fairly simple: John Robie (Grant) spent many years as a notorious burglar known as The Cat. He’s retired to the French Riviera, but when jewelry starts to go missing, the cops come after him. Robie has to unmask the real thief before either the authorities jail him or the old members of his criminal gang take matters into their own hands and silence Robie for good.

Into this tangle comes Frances Stevens, played by an absolutely radiant Grace Kelly. She’s a cold, restless American heiress whose mother owns diamonds the unknown thief is stalking. Frances sees Robie as an interesting distraction, and intrigue and sparks fly.

Continue reading “A Fine Romance Friday: To Catch a Thief” →

A Fine Romance Friday: Hysteria

I truly don’t understand why Hollywood has turned away from the romance–and why they never adapt romance novels to the big screen. Even when today’s filmmakers manage to produce a decent movie with a love story in it, such specimens all too often fly under the radar, waiting to be discovered on cable and streaming video services. Today’s selection is just such a film: Tanya Wexler’s 2012 historical romance Hysteria, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hugh Dancy, Jonathan Pryce, Felicity Jones, and Rupert Everett.

Our plot is thus: in the late Victorian period, the young doctor Mortimer Granville (Dancy) had been challenging outdated and inhumane practices in London hospitals, and he now finds himself unemployed. He takes a job with the older Dr. Dalrymple (Pryce) who treats hysteria in upper class women via, um, manual stimulation. The two develop a thriving practice, Granville becomes engaged to his partner’s young, biddable daughter (Jones). But he also repeatedly clashes with Dalrymple’s other daughter (Gyllenhaal), a suffragette who spends her days doing charity work in the East End of London and saying provocative things to every members of the upper crust she comes in contact with. Everything is good until Granville develops carpal tunnel syndrome, but his listless inventor friend (Everett) then invents a mechanical device to achieve the same effect. (Essentially an early vibrator.) It’s feminist fantasy history with bon mots tossed in.

Much like Beyond the Lights (which I recommended here!), Hysteria is a romance novel come to the screen. It’s witty and sweet, and the final romantic resolution is believable. While I sometimes found it to be a bit snigger-y (is that a word?) and while the film is far more prudish than it wants or needs to be given the subject matter, it’s a very enjoyable way to spend an evening.

A Fine Romance Friday: Down with Love

“Why, dear Emma, do you write mid-century romance, a subgenre which isn’t really a subgenre?”

“Well, gentle reader, the answer is simple: Down with Love.”

That’s right, this week’s fine romance Friday is Peyton Reed’s rom-com Down with Love (2003), which if you don’t know, stars Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor.

To talk about the plot of this movie is almost to the miss the point, but to blurb it briefly: Ewan McGregor is Catcher Block, “a man’s man, ladies man, man about town” who writes for KNOW Magazine (basically GQ). His newest assignment: write a tell-all about Barbara Novak (Ms. Zellweger), whose bestseller Down with Love is setting off a feminist revolution. He blows her off, then she insults him on TV, he becomes intrigued by her and pretends to be an yokel astronaut in order to seduce her and reveal to the world that she’s a–no, not that!–fraud. Except of course none of this works out. Hijinks ensue. And roll tape.

Look, you’re either intrigued by this set-up or you’re not. And I wouldn’t blame you if you want to run away screaming; this movie probably isn’t most people’s cup of tea. Except here’s the thing: I grew up watching way too much AMC, but back in the early 90s when AMC actually played classic movies. (Remember that?) And among those films were That Touch of Mink, Send Me No Flowers, Lover Come Back, and most of all Pillow Talk.

Continue reading “A Fine Romance Friday: Down with Love” →

A Fine Romance Friday: The Dish

Last night, I tweeted a bunch of funny, sexist, offensive, and odd nuggets from Gen’s and my research for the Fly Me to the Moon books. I Storify-ed the entire thing here in case you missed it.

On to today’s movie recommendation: The Dish, a 2000 drama directed by Rob Sitch starring Sam Neill and Patrick Warburton.

Before we get into the plot, I must warn you that this is not technically a romance.  Which is to say that there is a very small, though very sweet, romance subplot. But since my conceit with these posts is fine romances, the real romance here is with humans and the moon. What’s on that big rock in the sky? Can we get there? And what will we risk to share human exploration with the world? (And yes, I’m trying to tie it into my promo this week. Just roll with it.)

The Dish begins a few days prior to the July 1969 lunar landing. It’s set in Parkes, Australia, home to the largest satellite dish in the world. Parkes is one of the sites that’s going to help transmit the images from the moon to television sets everywhere.

The Dish is an ensemble piece, flitting from story to story: the bumbling mayor, with his devoted wife and his would-be radical daughter; the nerdy engineers and technicians who work at the dish who chafe under the oversight of the incredibly uptight engineer sent from NASA to oversee their work; and everyone else in town who can’t believe a man is going to walk on the moon and they are kind of, sort of adjacent to history.

The plot isn’t any more complicated than that. Things go wrong, and they fix them. History is achieved, and the pictures transmitted. It’s based on real events, although one major plot development is invented and I’m sure much of the rest is heavily fictionalized. But the charm of it comes in things that I can’t summarize for you: quiet conversations between friends, a fabulous late 60s soundtrack and perfect costumes, and this amazing thing that, almost 50 years later, it’s stunning that humans achieved. This isn’t an earth-shattering movie, but it’ll make you smile.

For this week’s fine romance Friday, cook up some lamb and watch The Dish.