Two Weeks Notice

The romantic comedy genre is full of really, really bad movies featuring douchie male leads and women who can be politely described as harpies. Think Made of Honor in which Michelle Monaghan berates Patrick Dempsey for his sex-toy bridal shower (an accident on his part) like a prudish little schoolmarm instead of a sophisticated 30-something woman living in New York City. No woman I know . . . and let's be honest I know a lot of freaks and perverts, you know people who vote Democrat so my point of view is clearly skewed. . . would ever have a hissy over something that silly, especially something that was so clearly a mistake. They'd probably love it.  But then, I don't know very many harpies.

It isn't very often you get a rom com these days with lots of witty banter and the sort of classic sexual chemistry of opposites at odds that you find in older films. In fact, the romantic comedies of the 1930's and 1940's (It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby) tend to have strong female leads and charming heroes whereas in modern romantic comedies, as I stated above, the tendency is adhere to gender stereotypes like something out of a Parade magazine or Andy Capp comic strip;  misogynistic gender roles in which the man is a semi-retarded, ugly little doofus and the woman is mega-hot but total naggin, manipulative bitch. The fact that these sorts of comedies out number the witty-banter ones 10 to 1 is rather disturbing.

Two Weeks Notice, however, is an exception to this rather depressing rule. It features Hugh Grant playing my favorite of his roles, the lovable cad and Sandra Bullock as a type-A lawyer with a social conscience.  However, Hugh Grant always comes across as intelligent and never dumb and Sandra Bullock is sweet, if neurotic. There's a great deal of back and forth but it is never cruel or mean-spirited. Moreover, nobody's fiance gets dumped at the end (number one rule of modern romantic comedies is that anyone who is engaged/married at the beginning of the movie will not be so at the end unless they are the quirky side-characters), nobody tries to date three different people at once, nobody interrupts a wedding at the last minute to make a declaration of love, and nobody learns a very important lesson about the true meaning of Christmas or whatever.

Instead you have Hugh Grant doing his best to channel Cary Grant at his goofiest and a plot based on the coming together of opposites.  I think, though, that it is Sandra Bullock's character that really makes the movie.  She plays Lucy, an intense, politically liberal, do-gooder. She's honorable and kind and a little manic but never really a bitch. She wants the world to be a better place and she's determined to make it that way. When she gets stressed out she over-eats (one of the few heroines, movie or otherwise who does. Who the hell stops eating when they are stressed? Answer: No one, that's why Americans are fat, because they are stressed out and poor.  I hate heroines who don't eat. It is a lie!) until she makes herself sick. She's an overachiever but she doesn't nag or manipulate. She's just blunt.  I find this very refreshing. I like her. I know her. She's a character who is more like the women I actually meet than the majority of female characters in romantic comedies who are caricatures of certain aspects of female traits. Take for example the excerable He's Just Not That Into You.  Now I have three sisters, the majority of my friends have been and are women (I went to a small liberal arts college. The straight male population was minute), I have worked in female dominated fields most of my life and I have rarely come across a woman as desperate as the character Gigi or a little ho like Scarlett Johannsen's character or a nagging, frigid bitch like Jennifer Connelly's character.  Nor do I encounter very many women who define themselves totally around their relationships with no outside interests or concerns. These are not the women I meet. Sometimes the women I know occasionally act like one of these stereotypes but these behaviors are not their defining characteristics nor the a representation of how they are the majority of the time. The fact that women are depicted in such a consistently awful light in romantic comedies is just disheartening. Therefore, I love the fact that Sandra Bullock's character is nothing like any of these. She may be intense and dutiful and a workaholic but she's not a bitch, at least not in the bad sense of that word. She's flawed but likable and realistic nor does she spend the entire film punishing Hugh Grant for some absurd mistake. It is more a film about them coming to the realization that they love each other. One of my favorite scenes is one in which they go to a lunch, order the same salad and proceed to switch, whilst carrying on an entirely separate conversation, various pieces of food from their plates. George takes all of Lucy's beets and then dumps all his ice cubes into her water. She stills all his croutons. Its very charming and the sort of thing very close friends, family or married people do.

I would like to see romantic movies go back to the old-fashioned sexual tension of something like a Katherine Hepburn and a Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, a Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, or even a Woody Allen and a Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery. It is curious that as gender and sex roles have changed and become much more loose and malleable, as women have gained power socially and politically that the heroines of romantic comedy films have become less charismatic, less powerful and more and more bitchy and weak.  Seriously, what's up with that?

I leave you with a clip montage from Two Weeks Notice brought to you by some person on YouTube

Jarvis Cocker is a God

This is Jarvis Cocker, minor deity and rock god. 

Jarvis and I have had a long relationship, a relationship that goes back to 1995.

Picture it:  Utah in late February of 1996. Grunge is dead.  Eddie Vedder is spending most of his time in Washington D.C. doing god only knows what, Kurt Cobain has been in his grave two years, and most of the new music coming out are the bands that are the copies of the copycats. Sad. What's a newly minted rebellious 15 year old girl to do?

Right now, everyone firmly believes that the next big thing is going to be Ska and with the Big Band revival a la the Brian Setzer Orchestra there's a lot of horns playing on the radio. My parents are in Europe with my two youngest sisters. Neither I nor Elizabeth can drive at this point so my cousin Ammon (Whatup, homey?) is "babysitting" us. This entails hanging out and driving us around. We all have tickets to Ska Patty's Day, a series of rock concerts over a week featuring different Ska bands. We drive between Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley attending events, skipping school and generally slacking. Ammon is delighted to be driving my father's delicious little sports car and all of us stay up way too late.

That's when I met Jarvis.

Rake-Tastic

The trouble with rakes in romances is that the author is constantly telling us that they are ever so bad and ever so nototrious and oh so dangerous but then they don't actually do anything rakish except throw out a few sexual innuendoes and maybe get the heroine to try oral sex.

The topic for this post has been brewing for some time but I realized I really needed to write about it yesterday. What happened yesterday? Well, I was on a plane. The romance selection in the JFK Hudson News is crap . . . . although not as crap as the selectionin the Phoenix airport. So there I was, waiting for a flight and I needed something to read. I had read all the books I brought ith me so I was lacking distraction. The book I wanted The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie was not there. So I got Always A Scoundrel by Suzanne Enoch. Now I had heard good things and I really enjoyed London's Perfect Scoundrel. So yeah!

Now I finished the book on the plane which either tells you how fast I read or how long the plane ride was.  I liked it. It wasn't a stand out in my brain but that's not the point. The point is that the hero, Lord Bramwell Johns, is not a rake. Oh it says he is, everyone says he is but he really doesn't do anything particularly rakish. I mean, the villain, the Marquis of Cosgrove was definitely a rake of the debauched variety. Now there was an interesting fellow! Clearly a sociopath and yet I found myself wanting him to be the hero because he was actually a rake so there was something to reform.

This is not a lone problem, isolated to Ms. Enoch's lastest book. Most of the time in romances we are told that so and so is The Most Vile Rake In Christendom and yet he doesn't do anything particular vile. I have decided that this is a threefold problem because I like things that come in threes.

First off, it is a problem of world view. The author relies too much on her audience knowing about Romanceland, the Regency period etc. She does not establish, separtately within the confines of her book the social mores and taboos of that world. This is not easy to do. One has to show how people view class, race, gender, and morality. This is hard because there is not one view on any of these things. Let's take JK Rowling for example. There are many weaknesses in the Harry Potter books but the one thing that Rowling did brilliantly was to establish how the world functioned not just on a practical level (with Quidditch and brooms) but on a moral level with the way that different wizards and witches related to and regarded Muggles, Voldemort, the non-human personages like golbins and so on and so forth. Rowling consistantly displayed what the standard, status quo approach was and what the violation of those standards were whether they were the Klu Klux Klan like activities of the Death Eaters or Hermione's SPEW (The House Elf Liberation Front).

The thing is you can do this with a few sentences or with a character's throwaway comments. Not every activity or dialogue needs to go back to the plot.  World views need to be presented.  Part of this is an historical issue because people tend to think of history as static rather than dynamic. Of course, there were certain standards by which the London ton operated but not everyone held to these standards. The standards that we read about are a middle ground, a mainstream status quo. The ideal of behavior and social interaction, not the actuality.  An aristoicratic Tory family is going to have a very different view from even an aristocratic Whig family of how the world should be. A Lord interested in science is not going to have the same regard for manners as a Lord obsessed with fashion. Therefore there has to be some establishment either by a description or dialogue, secondary or passing characters that defines how the world is and whether the main characters are violating that is.

The second problem is that I don't believe that anyone actually knows what  a rake is, because we don't have them anymore. They are extinct. 

An Open Letter to A Romance Novel Hero: Resurrecting the Idea

Grey aka Robert Fordham
c/o Joanna Bourne
The Spymaster's Lady

Dear Robert,

Thanks for not being a dillweed. I apprecitate that. I don't know if you've noticed (you probably have. You are very observant.) but romance novel spies tend to be intensely retarded. By intensely retarded I mean, if they were actually spies they would be dead by now on account of failing to 1) comprehend human behavior 2) not noticing the holy fucking obvious and 3) generally acting like a 14 year old boy having a hissyfit, although that is probably quite insulting to 14 year old boys.

My point, Robert, is that you behaved like a spy. Early on you had some wacky ideas about Annique but you didn't let these notions override what your senses observed, as a good spy ought. You noted the behavior of this woman and then concluded (correctly) that she was not the sort to do the kind of killing you had initially thought she had. Moreover, you realized that as a French operative she was duty bound to try to escape and you didn't hold that against her. In fact, you admired her for that. I appreciate you Robert Grey Fordham. I appreciate the fact that you aren't an asshat. Well done, sir, well done!

This Is Not A Love Song

This is not a love song.

This is not a love song.

This is not a love song.

This is not a love song.

 

--- Public Image Limited 

 

 

Vice Avenged: A Moral Tale by Lolah Burford is not a romance. But it is also not not a romance. It is a curious little book somewhere between fable and fairy tale, romance and picaresque novel. Quite frankly, I am not entirely sure what to make of it.

At the Library Book Sale

The library book sale is a treasure trove of romance novels. I went to the library on Saturday and discovered several classic Catherine Coulters with their glorious be-Fabio-ed clinch covers, several Rebecca Brandewynes, an African-American contemporary category title from 1984 and like 400 Jennifer Blakes some in hard-back. The best part is that paperbacks are only 25 Cents and hardbacks are $1.00. I had to resist the temptation to purchase all of the above.

I'm going back next week to see what new stuff they have. Maybe I'll even start making a circuit of the all the local branches every weekend. I'll take my camera with me and record what I see for romance posterity.

Are We There Yet?

This series is exhausting me. What series you may ask? Does it matter? I don't read series anymore. I can't. I can't bear it. They make me feel like a nine year old on a cross-country car trip in which the car is a 1958 Edsel with no air conditioning and a 60 year old man at the wheel who refuses to stop for bathroom breaks or go over 40 miles an hour. In other words, all I want is out.

Let me clarify what I mean by a series. Here's what I don't mean: anything with an end, a destination, if you will, a clear narrative arc leading to a conclusion despite the number of volumes. Or anything in which each book is loosely connected to the last one, where the old characters appear or are related to new ones but aren't the main focus of the new story. Let's take a little quiz, shall we?

Harry Potter? Not a series because, and this is very important, it ENDS. That, my friends is the key difference. There is a finale, a closure, a cut off point for the story arc.

What about Jo Beverley's Company of Rogue books? Not a series because each book stands alone and you can read them out of order, some not at all, and never be left out of pertinent plot points. Characters from one book appear in other books, but it is like visiting old friends and you don't feel like you are being jerked around on a never-ending merry-a-go-round of drama, like an episode of "Days of Our Lives" in which ten years in real time only equals about 48 hours in soap opera time.