Peek Into My Private Correspondence

This is basically because I'm too lazy to do a proper post write now. Well not too lazy exactly. It just seems like sometimes putting the amount of time I'd like to into this project and having a social life are completely at odds. Like I get out of seeing a great movie, and I think I need to walk home so I have some time to process it, and then I bump into someone on the sidewalk and we spend like two hours having this amazing conversation and then by the time I get home I think "Jesus it's ungodly hot outside and if I don't have some diet 7-Up and a double-lime popsicle and put my feet up post-haste I'm going to be in trouble." And then you fall asleep and you get up and you've got to associate with some other characters and you think "Where does the time go?" but you're not actually doing that much, technically speaking. Sigh.

So while this is slightly lazy, it nonetheless touches on a topic that is important to me.

My father sent me this article, some more (if thoughtful) musing on the long tortuous death of the romantic comedy.

I sent him an email in reply, and to be honest I often find communication with my father an awkward thing, vacillating between periods of extreme reticence and TMI. But I realized what I was writing him was actually kind of post-y, so I reproduce it for you here.

I've heard both the "teenagers drive the market" and the "stars as franchises" arguments before, and they certainly make sense. Another problem apparently is prevailing conventional wisdom is that while women will go see an action movie, men will never cross the threshold of a "chick flick" (the abysmal Neanderthalesque creature those "champagne comedies," as the French call them devolved into.) As a result, women are underserved in both markets, even though they're quite a bit more than half the moviegoing population. 

The Code certainly encouraged good dialogue (an inventive staging, such as the series of kisses, no single one longer than three seconds in Notorious). But the fact of the matter is until (unless, really) straight movies and hard core become completely integrated (interestingly, Linda Williams, who teaches at Berkeley, argues that people really believed this would happen after In the Realm of the Senses came out) there's going to be stuff you can't show and great cinema to be made. People have just gotten lazy.

I think another factor at play is (alas) the general decline of elegance in society. We live in a much more casual society, and I think those movies (though obviously well written, directed and acted) benefitted a lot from that luxe ambiance.

As depressing as the current climate is, I think we live with this myth of a golden past where every film made was a gem. The ones we still watch today are the best of the best. Of course the ratio of bad to good studio output has increased tremendously.

I was sort of disappointed neither of them mentioned any at least decent recent films. The only one that comes close to the oldies on style and quality is Kissing Jessica Stein and that's going back a few years now. Of course the directors (though not the writers) were snatched up by Hollywood to make Legally Blonde 2, which I unfortunately can tell you was just as awful as it sounds.

I agree (with a desolate tear in my eye) that there will probably never be another Lubitsch, I can't help but wonder what a 21st century Lubitsch would look like. Would we know him even if he came riding into town on a white steed to save us?

What I didn't mention to my father (because I didn't think it would particularly interest him) was that I think that if it were done really incredibly well, the Scott Pilgrim movie could be like the romantic comedy of our times. What Wasson says about Preston Sturges (albeit while tacitly acknowledging that Sturges is a slightly lesser artist than Lubitsch, although only slightly, and that could be because I tend to -- perhaps snobbishly -- gravitate toward the European sensibility) taking the American vernacular and making it his own applies equally to the source material here (although it is actually Canadian.) It has a very unique patter that certainly has antecedents in the irony-heavy '90s and slacker malaise, still sounds unique and strikes that very difficult combination of having a ring of authenticity while sounding more charming than real life conversation. Also, the visual style, borrowing elements from manga and videogames, equally promises something unique, though admittedly harder to replicate in live-action format. Perhaps all I've done here is set up unrealistic expectations.

And now, for Ernst, a little Chet Baker, the king of bittersweetness:

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