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Kamis, 27 Februari 2014

Girls Before Swine: Why We Can’t Have ‘The Heat’ Without Having ‘Dirty Harriet’ First

the heat mccarthy bullock

Make no mistake, “The Heat” is definitely a bold step forward for representations of women in film, and I’m sure you’ll be hearing plenty about how Paul Feig’s “Bridesmaids” follow-up is a cinematic landmark. It’s the first buddy cop movie starring girls! It’s proof that the glass ceiling is cracking, genre lines are blurring, and “Bridesmaids” made its mark with studio honchos.  It’s a post-feminist film world, everyone!

Some of this is undoubtedly true. It is gratifying to see female-driven comedy, and there is a thrill in seeing two talented women tackling a typically male genre. Be that as it may, sight unseen I can’t help but see “The Heat” as a consolation prize.

This isn’t all the fault of the film. Action comedy is a very specific and very prickly genre. It hit its zenith in the ‘80s and ‘90s with films like “48 Hours” and “Lethal Weapon,”  and it’s struggled since.  Most 21st century filmmakers can’t figure out the special mix of action and comedy, and they tend to be too heavy handed with one ingredient over the other.  The films are impossible to take seriously or lightly, and they make for an uncomfortable viewing experience as we’re unsure if the film is just bad, or if it’s meant to be silly in its carnage.  (See: “Olympus Has Fallen,” a film I’m fairly sure was intended as serious, but many people viewed as crackling with intentional wisecracks.)

Now, the reason we had successful action comedies is because they sprang from slick and irreverent action films.  “Dirty Harry” and “Bullit” beget “Lethal Weapon,”  “Beverly Hills Cop,” and “48 Hours,” because they made working the beat cool. The heroes wore sexy sunglasses and leather jackets, and they rolled their eyes at rules and regulations.  They chased bad guys in screeching car chases, collateral damage be damned, and they threw their badges.  The dry sarcasm of Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood was witty, and their crackling one liners could be nudged further into outright laughs.  (Watch “Dirty Harry” again. You’ll be surprised at how gleefully snarky Callahan actually is.)

The reason “The Heat” seems like something of a let down is that we have yet to enjoy a Dirty Harriet.  There was a time when it seemed she would appear thanks to characters such as Clarice Starling, Dana Scully, Lethal Weapon’s Lorna Cole, Holly Hunter in “Copycat” and even Angelina Jolie in “The Bone Collector.”  It felt like cinema was finally acknowledging that women did carry badges, guns, and could hold their own on the streets.  (Yes, I know two of those characters are FBI Agents, but it’s a variation on the same job, and I am trying to be generous.)  The movies were catching up to real life.

Yet we never did get a female cop as a lead character, like Martin Riggs or Bullit.   They’re usually sidekicks, and too often, they’re raw rookies who barely make it out of a film alive.   They’re variations on “The Enforcer” – aka “The One Where Dirty Harry Gets a Lady Partner” – where the policewoman spends the film trying to prove she can do the job, only to get shot for a rookie mistake.  “The Enforcer” ends uncertain as to whether women belong in uniform, and it set a pattern that films have followed since.  Look at “Lethal Weapon 3” – it ends nearly the same way as “The Enforcer,” and the next time we see Cole, she’s setting up house with Riggs, and pregnant with his child.   Even “Dredd,” a film bold enough to have a vicious female villain, couldn’t resist sending its female cop forlornly off the job.  Contrast this approach with any male-oriented cop film – especially one with a greenhorn partner – and you’ll see it ends with cigars, laughter, and congratulations all around. It’s always “You’ll be a hell of a cop, kid!”, not “Eh, not surprised I needed to bail you out, my delicate flower.”

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I feel like “The Heat” springs a lot from this tradition, rather than the cool and competent sarcasm that brought us Riggs and Murtaugh or Tango and Cash.  The movie is sold on images of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy being ungritty – despite the marketing’s insistence on McCarthy being the toughest cop of her station – and the laughs come from their inability to pull off the things Axel Foley could do in his sleep (to be fair, McCarthy is packing a rocket launcher on the latest poster).   To add giggles to girliness, they can’t handle the sight of blood! WOMEN!  They just fall apart at a little injury, whereas you can pump Stallone full of bullets, and he’ll laugh it off alongside the audience. Badasses take bullets; ballerinas break beer glasses and shriek.

It’s important to stress that “The Heat” isn’t the problem, and I’ve heard reports from those who have seen the film that it’s refreshingly assured in its empowering message, and nimbly avoids the traps that might make this yet another frustrating exercise in faux feminism.  Even so, this isn’t shaping up to be the Lady Lethal Weapon the world has needed, Paul Feig’s film playing instead like a female version of “The Other Guys,” a satire that benefits greatly from a sturdy genre tradition. We’re getting the satire without the subject, dessert before dinner, and so “The Heat” seems like swan song for a cinematic corner we never got to actually have.  If we never got our Dirty Harriet, will a film like “The Heat” ensure we never will?  Can you go gritty with a female cop protagonist after you already went goofy with her?

That’s hyperbole, of course.  Action comedy cops didn’t kill the police procedural, and never will.  But “The Heat” may make it that much harder for studios and audiences alike to take a female-driven version seriously.  After all, they haven’t been willing to do it before they shoved her into slapstick and Spanx jokes.  Why would they be willing to now?

Categories: Features

Tags: Beverly hills cop, Bridesmaids, Dirty harry, Elisabeth rappe, Hot fuzz, Melissa mccarthy, Paul feig, Sandra bullock, The Heat

Selasa, 26 November 2013

‘Before Midnight’ and the Cinema’s Greatest Trysts

lost in translation

“Well you know what it’s like when you first sleep with someone you don’t know. It’s…you like become this blank canvas, and it gives you an opportunity to project onto that canvas who you want to. And that’s what’s interesting because everybody does it.” – “Weekend”

“Before Midnight” opens today, and we at Film.com are all very excited about it. We’re excited about it because we’re fans of Richard Linklater, and so Vadim Rizov ranked all of his films. We’re excited about it because we love Ethan Hawke, for whom Jenni Miller took a look at his career resurgence. We’re excited about it because we love “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” which made this week’s Great Debate between Calum Marsh and Forrest Cardamenis all the more interesting a conflict. I’d like to add one more reason. I’m excited for “Before Midnight” because I adore its micro-genre.

I actually hadn’t seen either “Before Sunrise” or “Before Sunset” until about a month ago, while preparing for the New York premiere of “Before Midnight” at the Tribeca Film Festival. Yet I’ve loved films like it for years. Granted, there aren’t enough of them for it to be a real genre and at this point I think we’ve moved beyond that kind of categorization anyway. We still have “movements,” sure, but we get much more excited about genre-blending these days than their forming.

If I had to put a word to it, though, I might call them “tryst” films. These are movies about two people who meet and fall into romance, or lust, or even love at first sight. Yet whatever they have is fleeting, given a quick expiration date by a flight back to America or a ship pulling into port. They do a lot of talking. They may or may not actually consummate any sort of sexual relationship. And, perhaps most importantly, they never end with a classically happy Hollywood ending. Most romantic comedies, even the most tryst-like (“It Happened One Night,” “Roman Holiday”) don’t quite fit.

Here are seven of the best, presented with an eye on some of the tropes that connect them all.

The Chemistry – “Weekend,” directed by Andrew Haigh

Chemistry seems like an obvious thing to point out in a romance, but these films need a very particular kind. There needs to be the initial awkwardness of a first meeting, but also an underlying logic that makes these two people seem destined to be together. All of this needs to happen in the narrative space of about five minutes. Tom Cullen and Chris New are brilliant, selling every aspect of their short-lived affair. The sexual tension and resolution between them is the most naturalistic of the couples on this list, full of quiet joy and real emotional wisdom from both the actors and the script.

A Touch of Magic – “Friday Night,” directed by Claire Denis

While most of these films draw great strength from their realism, or at least the believability of their premise, the truth is that meetings like this are obviously rare in real life. The best of them know it and have a tendency to hint toward the supernatural. “Before Sunrise” winks in this direction, charming Jesse and Celine with a palm reader in a Vienna restaurant. “Friday Night” takes this one step further, surrounding lovers Laure and Jean with some mysteriously dancing inanimate objects and an otherworldly traffic jam.

The Romanic Locale – “Summertime,” directed by David Lean

“Before Sunrise” has Vienna and “Before Sunset” has Paris. And while neither city is completely unfamiliar for Celine, especially not the French capital, there’s a sense of discovery for both Jesse and the audience. Many of these films feature a backdrop, often one of continental glamor. In “Summertime” Katharine Hepburn falls in love with Renato and Venice equally, from the moment of her first glance at the city from the lagoon. David Lean’s gorgeous romance of an American abroad is still the definitive cinematic representation of La Serenissima in English and should stay that way.

Everybody Else – “Lost in Translation,” directed by Sofia Coppola

While the physical setting is often there to reinforce the romance, the characters on the fringe tend to serve as contrast. Some of this human chatter surrounds the lovers to make them seem more special, unique in a foreign or unfamiliar environment. This is often how Tokyo functions in “Lost in Translation,” though Sofia Coppola’s approach tends to waffle between pitch-perfect and unsettlingly Orientalist. Well-meaning advertisers and oblivious husbands add an air of thrilling exclusivity to the romance, allowing Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson to almost glow up against them.

Sexual Rule-Breaking – “Brief Crossing,” by Catherine Breillat

Warning: We’ve embedded the entire film below, some parts of which are NSFW.

“Anatomy of Hell” might be a more obvious Catherine Breillat film but its brutality and remove from reality make it more of a work of philosophy than a tryst film. The more muted (for Breillat, anyway) “Brief Crossing” on the other hand fits in quite well. It’s a work of transgressive sexual awakening for a married women and a teenage boy on an overnight ferry from France to the United Kingdom. It presents the awkwardness of their encounter with the director’s signature cold distance, which at the same time refuses to judge them. While no other film on this list has a pairing of such moral ambiguity, each of these relationships crosses some boundary with its (often only technically) casual sensuality.

The Confession – “Stuck Between Stations,” directed by Brady Kiernan

Almost every one of these films includes a moment of confession. This total opening of the characters to each other is a cornerstone of sorts, at the heart of the tryst’s resonance. The lovers can be totally honest because of their lack of formal relationship, a driving theme of “Before Sunset” in particular. “Stuck Between Stations” pushes this confessional approach to the brink. The bare truth shared by Becky (Zoe Lister Jones) and Casper (Sam Rosen) about the violence in their past is total. They get to be more truly themselves than ever before.

Recreation of Self – “Certified Copy,” directed by Abbas Kiarostami

“Certified Copy” might be the ultimate example of the genre, or at the very least the culmination of its themes. Author James Miller (William Shimell) and a nameless Juliette Binoche meet in Tuscany. They drive around in the gorgeous countryside discussing authenticity, sharing an artistic kinship with the canvasses of “Weekend.” Their relationship ebbs and flows before our eyes, and eventually shape shifts into something undefinable and without a single interpretation. The two are true with each other, genuine if not honest. Yet this openness isn’t simple or transparent, but rather as infinite and complex as the human character. “Certified Copy” seems to contain every nuance of the tryst but without any necessary reduction. It would make the perfect double feature with anything on this list, and may very well be the most resonant film of the 21st century so far.

Categories: Features

Tags: Andrew Haigh, Before Midnight, Claire Denis, Daniel Walber, Friday Night, Lost in translation, Richard linklater, Sofia coppola, Summertime, Trysts, Weekend