In the spirit of movies like Before Sunrise and My Dinner With Andre, What Happens Later is essentially a 1.5-hour long conversation between your dad and the woman he loved when he was thirty. Willa and Bill get snowed into an airport overnight and have a postmortem about their romance, which ended twenty-five years earlier.

When I first saw this movie announced, I promptly ran off to buy and read the stage play upon which it is based. The trailers made everything look so shiny/stylized/simplistic that I kinda thought the leads were dead, and the airport was Purgatory. The title also supports such a reading. I could not get emotionally invested until I knew if this was the case.

I’ll try to refrain from spoilers otherwise, but I’ll tell you this: They’re not dead.

Phew.

Now that we know these adorable Boomers are alive, we can appreciate what’s actually a stylized rumination about love and life. Romcom sweetheart Meg Ryan has spent much of her career living through the love stories of fictional people who usually never age past their thirties; now she’s “forty-nine years old” (respectful cough) but still thinking about what love means.

Ryan and Duchovny have a great rapport, especially if you’re fond of the kind of romcom where the leads bicker for a while. The development of their relationship throughout the movie changes in a dramatic but expectedly tropey direction, and it all feels very natural.

Like the play, the history between these two is revealed slowly through dialogue as they begin to open up to one another. And once we see how and why the two of them never healed after each other, I got weepy! It was so well-performed. I really didn’t think I could like Duchovny enough to care, but I really, really cared.

The stylized elements make it clear the whole time that these two need to be brought together so they can connect and heal. It’s the most fundamentally romcom element. Turning away from love left them unhealed for years, but as soon as they got back into it, they could find a way to be whole again. It feels like Meg Ryan is shouting the thesis statement of her career into the universe with What Happens Later: Love each other, darnit! Love makes it better!

Meg Ryan’s style as a director is all over this movie, and I gotta say, I love how spacious it is. She likes to give cuts room to breathe. She frames everything like paintings, focusing on composition, geometry, and values in order to create moments that look the way they feel. I would love to see more just like this from Meg Ryan. I know there’s a big appetite for romances featuring people older than thirty-five, forty-five, and older. There’s no age where this message loses its shine. I’m here to support you, Meg Ryan!

This is a really nice holiday romcom that belongs on the shelf with your other warm cozy holiday flicks, although there is more of an HFN than an HEA. But there’s plenty of room to imagine an HEA if you want one. I like how the movie doesn’t *need* an HEA. (I totally am imagining one.)

(image source: Bleecker Street)

This must be my favorite execution of the family-focused romance. You know, the kind where one person falls in love with another person, and also their family. It was done beautifully in While You Were Sleeping. You see it with the single dad’s little family in The Holiday.

Here, the open-hearted way that Ian (John Corbett) embraces the family of Toula (Nia Vardalos) is especially healing. I love when a romance puts together two characters who just feel like they need each other — not in a weird codependent way, but like something was missing for both of them, and the other person has it. Ian has a wholehearted acceptance of Toula, a large part of which is her family, that Toula needs in order to accept she deserves love. Toula has a life filled with fun and laughter and family, which Ian (single child of two perpetually confused parents) is lacking.

The chemistry is off the charts for Ian and Toula. The fact we know they’ve gotta get married (the movie title promises it) just makes me absolutely *squirm* with delight seeing how much Ian falls smitten with Toula instantly. She’s still shuffling through self-doubt when this man, in his heart, has already married her and made seventeen kids together. It’s the kind of When You Know You Know love that we all hope for.

As a story about an immigrant culture in America, you can also feel the love from the creators for all things Greek. Sometimes this is an eye-rolling love for restaurants named Aphrodite’s Palace, wedding invitations with the Greek flag, and styling the front of your ranch house like the Parthenon. But it’s mostly just sincere, genuine love for the quirks of a big weird family, like your dad who is convinced Windex is a medical cure-all.

Coming from different cultures makes for potential hiccups, but Ian’s willingness to turn the world upside-down to accept every atom of Toula means that everything goes fine anyway. Toula’s traditional dad is afraid of losing something important if his daughter marries a guy who isn’t Greek. But Ian doesn’t bat an eye. He does everything he can to assimilate with the family, and that’s meaningful for a family that’s been halfway assimilated to a new country and fiercely defending what’s left of their traditions. Ian makes it clear: I’m gonna defend these traditions with you. He even uses Windex on his pimple. Now that’s love.

~

On a personal note, this movie feels like family to me personally. I’ve been watching it constantly since it came out, so these characters have been in my life since I was a teenager, and revisiting the movies always feels like going to visit with cousins I haven’t seen in a minute. (I will be watching the sequels soon, but I haven’t yet.)

My husband’s family is Italian American, his granddad having immigrated with his family, and parts of this feel very authentic to his experience. I think that my mom, a first generation American from the Irish diaspora, also seemed to relate to this strongly when we watched it together. I think this must be a story for a lot of families. How many Americans have only been Americans for a couple generations?

We had Irish flags hanging on the walls when I grew up, as well as banners covered in the Irish language, with songs, fables, and maps on constant display. I never got good at pronouncing Irish. But I got candy from my grandma’s visit to her home in Dublin annually, and I learned how to play tin whistle while feeling guilty about not attending church, which is fairly Irish Catholic.

In a way, these things are the ways my mom and grandma were ways they tried to keep alive tradition. Just like how my spouse’s family used to participate in Italian-related festivals every year, flying their flags, making their family recipes, and being a big shouting mess of sprawling multigenerational family.

They wanted this important part of their families, themselves, to remain alive in the memories of children who never set foot in their home countries. That longing is very sweet. I bet a lot of Americans recognize this story as similar to their own.

Randomly clicking movies last night led me to a movie listed as romance and a thumbnail full of women. If you know about Mona Lisa Smile, then you know I’m pretty disappointed.

What begins as a boatload of promising sexual tension with hot college-aged women bullying their hot young woman art professor turns into being mostly about heterosexuality. Being a woman is a prison, college is for the MRS degree, marriage sucks, etc.

Of course all of these things are true: getting married, especially to a ~man, is a fuckin trap. It’s changed since 1953, but some central core of truth remains.

No, what’s weird is making a movie about a women’s college into a movie about heterosexuality with only one (1) perceptible lesbian, who is broomed off-screen promptly by one of the white blonde actresses.

(So it turns out Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst in the same movie is too much for me. I can tell you which one is which actress when they’re on screen if I think about it for a minute. But I can’t remember who played which character to save my life! My brain conflates them completely. They’re just some white blonde girl, an eldritch mass of similar casting opportunities, who occupy a similar place in my childhood cinematic life.)

To be clear, the story wouldn’t need to be massively changed to be realistic about the amount of sapphic shenanigans in a women’s college. Heterosexual marriage is and always has been an economic institution – primarily a business partnership – that is expected of most adult humans going back a fair distance, and you’ll find that a solid 80% of gay shit happens between people who are, have been, or will be in a heterosexual marriage. Hello! Bisexual femme here! I am an expert in banging straight women.

But there’s zero chance that all this drama and shouting between girls would have been this low-drama in reality. “Mona Lisa Smile was low drama for girls?” Yes bitch, you heard me. You know how many more fingernails would have come out arguing about their conservative vs liberal ideals if everyone had been fucking the way we know they would be fucking?

Like. Everything between Julia Roberts and her indistinguishable white-blonde students would have gotten so much nastier if things were nasty the way we know they were.

And generally Mona Lisa Smile would have been so much more interesting.

There was a lot here that I really enjoyed watching. It was obviously a *good* movie that knew what it was doing – like remember how they remade Ocean’s 11 with actresses? ha ha I love when they let girls do things the boys do – and Mona Lisa Smile had all the cinematic technique required to be the girl version of Dead Poets Society.

I could see someone having real room in their heart for this flick. I’m not gonna look it up, but I bet it was Oscars bait back in 2002, and the cast is frankly just ridiculous. Aside from indistinguishable white blondes, there’s also Maggie Gyllenhaal, that silver fox from Mad Men, that one guy I recognize from that one thing, and basically all the Known Actors you’d need to do Oscars networking. It’s edited in a melodic way. The actresses served up cunt on a platter. It is pleasing to watch. The story is satisfyingly constructed. I like the visuals.

I’ve just got zero patience for a version of femininity that’s all white straight cis women (+nod for a lesbian). It’s taupe. It’s boring. It’s inaccurate. It’s a wasted opportunity to get these actresses making out for me to discover 21 years later.

(image source: Columbia Pictures)

Did you ever have one of those weird, magical nights that felt like they went on forever? Maybe when you were young and only tentatively attached to the relationships in your life. When it felt like maybe you should use your full tank of gas to get out of dodge, leave your apartment behind, live in your car a while–a romantic fantasy of abandon, hopefully with the dreamy guy you’re talking to right now. The kind of night where anything is possible.

In Serendipity, Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack have a magical night together that feels like that, and then they go about their lives. Whereas romances built on Some Magical Day like Before Sunrise focus exclusively on that Magical Day itself, Serendipity takes a step back and lets time move on within the film. Our hero and heroine are separated for the remainder of Serendipity, aside from a beautifully aesthetic final moment.

Serendipity is conceptually rooted than many other slightly more grounded romcoms. Most substantial conversations are built around the question of whether fate and true love exist. There are a few different takes on this question. We see Molly Shannon selling something she considers childish New Age bullshit, and John Corbett playing American Yanni is playing with some kind of spiritual devotion to his vision of music. Corbett is especially selfish in his interaction with this Hand of God. He expects that *he* is God, to some degree, and so he easily overlooks Beckinsale’s needs until she’s no longer serving his.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Piven has lost his reason for hope, having divorced the wife he always argued with (but only when nobody was looking). Piven fears that forgetting about true love meant fate forgot about them. He wants his best-queer-friend Cusak to cling to his passion for life–for real love. (I give a sentence of this review in honor of Cusack’s character’s jilted fiancee, who was given about as much consideration in the film itself.)

Piven and Cusack’s eagerness to chase down even the smallest hint of a clue in order to find Beckinsale shouldn’t work, but it does. At no point does Serendipity leave us worried things won’t work out. Fate has this in hand. Even a fluttering Eugene Levy is only a quick stumble on a smooth road toward reunion, with our hero and heroine dancing just out of reach from one another like a New York Christmas ballet.

Is there any sort of long-term future for Beckinsale and Cusack? They don’t really know each other, and Cusack imbues this character with the same caustic neuroticism as many of his roles. But that question is really beside the point. The question of the movie is whether these two can stop being so worried about their busy thirty-something lives in order to trust fate again, and find their true love, and they do. Under the snow, under the stars, with Cassiopeia’s dress over her head.

(Image Source: Miramax Films)

Notting Hill is one of the more charming, off-beat romcoms of the 90s, focusing on acting greats Rhys Ifans and Emma Chambers as they fall in love.

Surely you already know household name Rhys Ifans, whether in his performance as Sherlock’s brother on Elementary (when he was a lazy but sophisticated man of the world) or when he was the villainous enemy on House of the Dragon. He really shows off his range.

In this role, Ifans is a dodgy Welsh guy who lives in a Notting Hill flat. He wants love, but he’s not sure how to approach it. Clearly without social skills, including no sense of appropriate dresswear, Ifans has found himself a bit of an outsider. Much of his socialization comes from a flatmate who owns a bookstore, and Hugh Grant’s mumblingly incoherent character seems to tolerate Ifans at best.

Still, it’s impossible not to fall in love with a hero who is so unabashedly himself. He doesn’t hesitate to wear a scuba suit if that’s all he’s got. When he finds himself unexpectedly in front of cameras wearing nothing but pants, it’s not a moment of shame, but a moment of self-celebration. Try not to swoon when he playfully clenches his buttcheeks.

As his opposite, we have Chambers as Honey, the adorable sister to the bookseller flatmate. Her distinctive features are played up for effect and everyone acts like she’s odd-looking in comparison to other people, rather than just looking like a normal human. Pronounced eyes (exophthalamus) and brittle hair might be indicative of a thyroid disease, but everyone just sorta treats her as a weird lil uggo.

It’s easy to judge Honey. Much like Ifans, Chambers’s character is socially inappropriate. She’s got no boundaries meeting a prospective sister-in-law the first time and seems to have lost the filter between her brain and mouth.

Real love often involves meeting people exactly where they are, which Chambers and Ifans do here, falling in love over the course of some random six-month depression that Grant’s character sustains. By the end of the movie, I’m cheering for Chambers to subtly shoot a marriage proposal at the dinner table to Ifans: the celebration of love over human mediocrity.

For the dodgy-looking weirdos out there, this is one of the most loving romcoms possible.

Oh there’s an A-plot as well. Actress, shopkeeper. They are very attractive. I want to make them kiss like dolls.

But mostly the Rhys Ifans stuff.

I loved Nimona, which is essentially a trans narrative. Gorgeous movie for a lot of reasons, not least of all the animation.

It’s striking how well Nimona captured one particular thing I don’t often see in media: How our allies/friends can hurt us so deeply and stand to reinforce the systems that abuse us all.

Bal is our hero, and Nimona’s friend, yet he is also in several of Nimona’s flashbacks when she’s melting down over folks being cruel to her.

At one point Bal says (to paraphrase) “Of course I’M not like this but I’m just helping teach you what the world is like.”

I think about that sentiment a LOT. Because in that moment, Bal is ‘the world.’ He is the person reinforcing the bias against Nimona, trying to bang her into shape to escape embarrassment and oppression. Bal is her greatest ally in the movie and he’s also the one we see who most often expresses transphobic (monsterphobic) sentiments to her face.

I think about all the teachers (and adults in general) who abused me because they said, “I don’t think this way, but I have to get you ready for the world.” Those teachers were the world. They banged me up way more than most anyone else. And they did it under the guise of helping me. Being allies.

Nimona has left me shooketh and this particular thread is the main reason.

I have been this Bad Ally to people. I have been Bal, unintentionally passing on the system’s abuse. I have been Nimona, abused by allies who consider themselves my friend.

(Posted on my Letterboxd 06 Jul 2023.)
(Image credit: Netflix.)