Normally, I’m the last person who would get into an inspirational romance, but tis the season for clicking on movie thumbnails that look vaguely like holiday romcoms. I went into Last Holiday knowing it’s only a Queen Latifah comedy. I was pleased to find a movie that fully embodies the holiday cozies that I seek during my yearly holiday movie thing. (art credit: me, Sara)

So here’s the sitch: Latifah has been working hard at a retail job for a decade, putting her trust in God that as long as she keeps herself right, everything will turn out right. She’s got a diary of potentials that includes a fabulous life full of vacations and love (with hunky coworker LL Cool J). But first she’s gotta work hard, help out her sister and neighbors, and keep going to church. Things have struck a sorta dull rhythm until our gorgeous heroine’s life gets shaken up by the misdiagnosis.

The idea has potential for getting depressing – I can ruminate on dying without help, thank you – but the emotional moments are strong without becoming overwhelming. It’s extremely fair for anyone to melt down a little bit over a terminal diagnosis. But Latifah’s character permits herself few moments of self-pity. Her relationship with herself is strong, as is her relationship with God, which doesn’t exactly waver but does often prompt Latifah to Give Him the Eye and ask, “Really?” The whole “Why me?” chorus she shares with her church community is heart-wrenching.

But still, it’s mostly light, and there’s a lot of quality class commentary going on. Retail’s a job with a lot of disrespect coming straight from the managers who don’t recognize you. Latifah’s main method of survivalism has been learning to keep her mouth shut. She’s totally lost her voice.

Once she realizes that being good in life hasn’t led to the best outcome, she decides to stop deferring her joy. Latifah cashes out on her assets to embark on a luxury European vacation. She also finds her voice. She meets everyone with complete honesty–but also complete compassion. And the world around her heals a little bit for it. Just a little. But oh boy does it feel good.

Bear in mind that this movie is loosely adapted from a 1950s flick starring Alec Guinness; this screenplay was originally intended for John Candy (with Carl Reiner directing no less!). I bet you can imagine the pure heart that is written into our hero/ine, then–along with strong physical comedy demands that Latifah meets wonderfully.

I mean it as the highest praise when I say that I think Latifah did as well as Candy could have in bringing her entire heart to the character, but she wears it on her outside more than I think Candy might have, and fairly so; this is a working class character who goes on vacation and immediately is forced to deal with her corporation’s boss. Like, can’t she relax before she dies?

If you’re familiar with the trope at play here, you know the movie’s going to have a happy ending. In fact, it’s pretty uniformly happy. I love it when romantic comedies take an opportunity to place us in a fantasyland that gives humanity some credit. People really are generally nice! Or at least, they want to be. Even the billionaire boss has his glimmering moments of humanity, and Latifah’s character is open-hearted enough to witness it, even if she’s got the boundaries of steel to protect herself too.

The romance here is an important relationship but not the most central one; I’d argue that’s between Latifah and God. But Hunky LL Cool J performs fabulously as a man whose job is to be head-over-heels for a woman as perfect as Latifah. That man faces a fear of flying to hike across an avalanche to make sure he can tell her that he loves her before she dies. Like, oof.

She also befriends an unexpected but charming Gerard Depardieu, and their chemistry is so good, I actually kinda wanted them to end up together. Can she have all of them? Giancarlo Esposito too. She’s way too good for him, and she’s right to turn him down, but also I argue that he is very cute and maybe she can fix him idk. This is a fantasy of hope, right?

I’m totally putting this on my yearly circulation, right with other ultra-cozies like While You Were Sleeping and When Harry Met Sally.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)

“You know what movie is so funny but nobody talks about? Popstar by Andy Samberg,” say I, a Millennial, who tends to think SNL was the funniest when I was in my early twenties for some reason.

Ten years from now, we will hear a Z or Zennial saying, “You know what movie is so funny but nobody talks about?” and it will be this, in much the way this will be the funniest-ever era of SNL for them. “Will Farrell? I have no idea who that is. Marcelo Hernandez, on the other hand…”

Funny and well-paced, but somehow unremarkable, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is one of those comedies most likely to be adored by stoned teenagers for decades to come.

In interviews, the creators said “Treasure” is meant to feel like Goonies, but there’s a special distinction here: This is a view of Goonies that sees Goonies as an ancient classic predating their era, not a Goonies that originated from their childhood. Any of these guys might tell us about how much their parents loved Goonies as a kid, so they watched the DVD rerelease, or something like that.

It feels different.

It’s impressive to keep hold of the viral internet shorts feeling for an entire narrative without getting annoying. I think the pace would satisfy someone used to watching internet playlists for hours instead of movies. But the pacing also slows enough to avoid becoming intolerable for someone patient enough to wait two hours to download a 15mb video clip with the resolution of a potato.

My favorite Gen Z influence is how casually fat women are included in the cast. There is zero acknowledgment, textually or in the director’s vision, of the fact 2/3 of the lead women are fat, and not like Hollywood in the 90s fat where Hugh Grant is snogging a woman with a hint of butt. These two park rangers are just stupid assholes like the three nerdy weeds they’re chasing. Hot, horny, stupid, useless, fat girl park rangers? Have I ever been so represented in a movie before?

~

It kinda seems like this generation of creators are obsessed with cults.

In “Treasure” Bowen Yang is the cutest most flawless cult leader to walk the Earth, as Bowen Yang is the cutest most flawless anything to play anything any time he shows up. His cult is hilariously scary. This is not the only cult I’ve seen in recent culture, and the more I think about it, the more I can name.

Midsommar was one of the more enjoyable cult movies recently; I posited that Mandy was the nighttime-flavored version of Midsommar. Ready or Not and Get Out give us whole family cults too.

Cult of the Lamb has become a fabulously famous indie game, and I’ve been playing Cultist Simulator for years.

TV shows give us cults all the time, like in Yellowjackets, The Path, Big Love, and American Horror Story Season Whatever.

We live in a time where cults can be so mainstream, the highest grossing movies of the year might star An Actual Cultist, the president might be a cultist, your parents might have gotten turned into cultists, and we have all known multiple people who got sucked into a cult selling candles/soap/makeup/knives/whatever.

Obviously some of the groups I’m bringing to mind aren’t explicitly cults, but rather some kind of socially predatory system that makes folks toxic to be around and may endanger their lives (but almost always their bank accounts).

I’ve got a theory why cult-like presences are so common in America right now, and it’s pretty simple: Humans are social animals that need communities to survive. We are never meant to function independently, or even in small cells (like a couple with a child). We don’t have the tools to do it. But we’re all poor as hell and working way too much to build communities with our neighbors–not to mention, who’s getting along with their neighbors right now? So we just get lonely. Some very basic part of our soul gets sick. And then it’s really easy to take advantage of the sickness.

Predatory megachurches, pyramid schemes, fad gyms, extreme political discussion boards, and other places are happy to sell us a substitute to the communities we might naturally grow if we weren’t always running around playing survivalist games, working long hours to pay medical bills.

So even if we haven’t tripped into one of these cult-like settings, we know people who have, and all of us are curious about wtf that looks like.

That’s my theory anyway.

In The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, the cult exists in the story to replace one character’s sense of community. His friends are growing up and moving on. The one who looks drawn by Tim Burton is joining a church and getting a house with his girlfriend; the one who looks like Conan O’Brien’s son is trying to inherit Conan O’Brien’s business. With nobody else willing to put up with some guy whose penis occasionally escapes his pants in full public view, there is only the not-so-loving arms of a cult to turn to.

In the end, friendship wins, because that’s the whole theme of the movie. This is so explicit that they might have a random character beatbox about friendship and treasures to propel the plot onward. It’s not subtle, but subtlety is overrated.

I’ve wasted a lot more time watching movies with many fewer laughs per minute by SNL alums than this.

I avoided watching this one for a while because I was convinced I’d hate it. The concept is creepy to me. I’ll accept a horror movie where a woman claims to be a man’s fiancée and gaslights him and his family into accepting her. But a romance?

Turns out I was all wrong. A potentially ooky situation is played with such a deft, airy hand that it never gets weird. “Sleeping” shows how integral every element of a production is to setting the tone. Expressive music ranges from goofy slapstick to heartfelt, actors play situations lightly, Chicago is filmed with warmth like it’s a dream, and a few smart plot choices keep us on the heroine’s team.

This toes the line between Funny Enough To Not Take Seriously and Earnest Enough to Care. It does it really well.

As with many of my other favorite romances, Sandra Bullock’s character falls in love with the hero’s family first. She basically says herself toward the end that the whole romance here is between a very lonely, very sweet Bullock and the family she wished she could join. Gosh, who can’t sympathize with that?

I just watched My Best Friend’s Wedding, and Julia Roberts’s motivations weren’t sympathetic enough. We got a couple glances at insecurity and her humanity. But it wasn’t enough, especially when she had such a support system and was happy to use people. Bullock’s motivations are painted so sympathetically that you might actually be okay with her marriage to the coma dude after he wakes up and seems okay with it too.

Bullock’s secret becoming revealed to one of the elder family friends early on makes it so she has an adorable co-conspirator and also a plausible reason for continuing to lie. As a writer, I was kinda jealous of how smart that is. I’m not jealous anymore because I’m definitely doing that in a book later. (Hey, like they say, great artists steal.)

It takes a while for hero Bill Pullman to actually show up in the movie, and I barely remember a thing about him. The chemistry is very good. I understand a lot of people really love him as a character, but the romance didn’t do much for me. It speaks volumes that the rest of it was nice enough to keep me on the line.

When it comes to comfort movies, this one is so comfortable, I could imagine using it to drift off to sleep every night before bed. While You Were Sleeping indeed.

I do think it’s amazing how recognizable Pullman’s floppy hair is. If you want to talk about things that typify 1995, I’d put Pullman’s floppy hair on the list. And shout out to While You Were Sleeping for daring to spend so much time around working class people, which a lot of romcoms have zero interest in doing.

(image credit: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution)

I can give Save the Last Dance an impartial analysis about as much as I could impartially analyze one of my siblings. I was thirteen when this movie landed in my life; at exactly the right age, and the exact pallor, to love the many virtues this movie holds for its target audience.

There’s no doubt *plenty* to be said about the flaws in its approach to race. None of that could possibly come from me, on so many levels.

Here we have an adorable Julia Stiles (who looks nothing like a professional ballet dancer) doing dreadful, awkward choreography, and I love every moment of it. Who choreographed this movie? I think this might be the dance-oriented movie with the worst dancing in it. Let me know if there’s a worse one because I want to watch it.

Stiles lost her mother in a car accident. Because her mother was driving to reach Stiles’s dance audition, Stiles blames her love of dance for the death. It’s natural for young people to blame themselves for the foibles of adults. Learning that the whole world isn’t about “you” is an important part of coming of age. Stiles is taken out of her known world to live with a dad she barely knows somewhere new.

This is a classic 90s YA novel setup that immediately puts me into the most comfortable territory imaginable as a kid.

Throw in a romance that involves “sexy” dancing with Sean Patrick Thomas, and basically I was rabid about it. Frothing at the mouth. White-girl dancing in my living room to “Put Your Back Into It.”

Rewatching this immediately put me back into the body of a thirteen year old at the most awkward age of her life who thought that this movie could possibly have any relationship with reality. As a smallish-town kid who hadn’t been anywhere, all the shots of the Chicago inner city with a blue filter truly looked Stiles had gone through the looking glass into an MTV video.

This was some other world, an elevated Romeo and Juliet between a character who could easily be dropkicked out of the screen so that I could replace her and have my butt touched by Sean Patrick Thomas. Everyone at the club would be like, “Wow, that awkward white girl with braids really has a sense of rhythm.” And I would have a sense of rhythm. I really, truly would.

I gotta say, rewatching it as adult, even with the nostalgia, I could notice that the white lens of the movie is painfully strong. Parts of it don’t make sense without racist assumptions pre-installed. You need context on what white people thought about race in the year 2001 to get meaning out of some parts, like Julia Stiles sitting in a completely normal waiting room, as if it’s some high drama for a white ballerina to be in a public health clinic. It’s gotta be pretty bad if I noticed that while seeing how much bad choreography I remembered, awkwardly, swinging my middle aged butt and bouncing in place until Juilliard embraces me.

(Image credit: Paramount Pictures)