There is something caustic and bright and bitter and totally unhinged about 2000s comedies, especially college comedies. Every movie asks you to enter a fantasy world of its construction; comedies of this era made a fantasy where there was only Hot Girls and Ugly Girls. One type existed visibly, with value, and the other type was a makeover away from becoming the first kind, which is important. All women exist relative to their importance to heterosexual white male boners.

The House Bunny resides firmly in a more sympathetic corner of this universe, but nonetheless the same universe, and as a femme who was unlucky enough to turn 20-years-old in 2008, it’s hard to react positively to *any* corner of it. In many ways, The House Bunny externalizes so many of the most toxic ideas that I had managed to internalize from my environment.

It’s remarkable, then, that I could receive The House Bunny without any protective nostalgia (I hadn’t seen it before now!), and still manage to fall smitten with a whole lot of it.

I don’t think there’s much point in talking about anyone but Anna Faris. That’s not to say that there weren’t a lot of great performances – the ensemble is stacked to a ridiculous degree, including Adam Sandler’s favorites and a few smart picks from the outside – but that Anna Faris-with-character-appropriate-fresh-lip-fillers delivers a once-in-a-lifetime performance so singular, I wonder why she never “blew up” bigger in the industry.

The exact same screenplay would have been radically different led by anyone else, and I can’t imagine *anybody* with the combination of comic talents that Anna Faris has. Her warmth, vulnerability, and good humor are matched by a propensity for also suddenly scream-snarling and staggering away from a grate with second-degree-burns. She goes from saying everyone’s names in a monster-voice to being irresistibly sweet to cackle-shriek funny within the same sentence sometimes. I don’t understand how it’s possible to do it in a way that feels lovably authentic.

I want this woman to be my best friend, my mom, my wife, etc.

Also, having always seen Anna Faris in more normal contexts outside of this, like holy shit she’s so banging? Her body? Is? Ridiculous? She looks better than Playboy Bunnies do, and in fact looks better than the beauty standards of the era, which were pretty anemic. I don’t wanna get gross out loud about her physique but, just, damn. I could go on for a while. I will be going on for a while, privately.

(What the hell is wrong with Chris Pratt?)

I’ve never seen Emma Stone this good, either. With the excellence of Faris, nobody should be able to keep up with her, but Stone is actually a perfect foil. They’re such a good girly comic duo, more similar than different, though with wholly different results. Faris’s character is usually sexy when she lets loose because she’s a Sexy Person, but when Stone tries to sexily let loose, she’s off on a rant about mice dressed as Abraham Lincoln, and I like both of them so much.

If I wrote paragraphs about every actress who murdered in this movie, I’d be doing a master’s thesis. Beverly D’Angelo is in the movie. BEVERLY D’ANGELO! Oh my God, I wish she would punch me in the tit. So I just wanna add that Adam Sandler’s friend Dana Goodman playing a Zeta member who is essentially a human yeti is entirely glorious.

I love women too much not to love this movie, basically.

I get the sense that The House Bunny wanted to love women more than the culture of 2008 did, too. Maybe this was the start of something new and better? Most tropes could have been performed more offensively, for however much that means. They veered away from homophobic representations. In fact, in The House Bunny, anything other than heterosexuality is utterly nonexistent, even for the gratification of the male gaze. (Think of how many comedies you’ve seen with excuses made up for straight girls to wrestle and/or kiss.) It’s possible they chose zero gay rep over homophobia. It’s *so* aggressively straight. Again: Zetas may be ugly, disabled, not white, or very hot but pregnant, but they may not be queer.

The movie, my life, and society in general would have been better if Faris and Stone’s characters were capable of seeing how they helped one another become better, and if they could have had a romantic resolution together. Instead, there are two random dudes to reward the girls for their personal growth. Okay fine whatever.

(Yes, I really do think every movie from the 00s would be better with more lesbians and trans women, and considering how brutal that decade was to live through as a girl romancing girls, I shall make no apologies for my unchecked rage.)

The bitterest pill to swallow in retrospect is the myth of Hefner and the Playboy Bunnies, as we know everything happening there was greasy, gross, exploitative, and not nearly as fabulous as the reality show sought to portray it. You have to accept that myth to enjoy this movie because The House Bunny relies upon the idea that Anna Faris could be a pure soul because she was so loved and accepted among her hypersexual sistren at the always-partying Playboy Mansion. It’s gross. It’s all so gross.

And yet.

Remembering details of The House Bunny makes me want to rewatch it already, just because I don’t think I can get enough of Anna Faris in this role. Or Kat Dennings! (Lesbian coded until she becomes Lizzie Maguire coded.) Or Shooter McGavin. Or… But it’s also gross in ways that bother me personally, so I struggle to turn off enough to enjoy it. I bet I would love loved it in 2008.

I think it would be fair to say this is a great comedy made by huge talents in an era that was a cultural wasteland for America. I don’t love revisiting my young adulthood’s pop culture, but I’m glad I did for this one specifically.

(illustration credit: me)

I can’t rapture over this flick without some visual aids. All images in this post are credited to Apple.~

Storytelling is the most ancient human art; acting out those stories is presumably equally old. In such terms, Shakespeare’s stories aren’t *so* old, and we certainly have older. But the kind of story that Shakespeare tells through MacBeth is a very ancient story indeed, about hubris and power and the ability of a breathtakingly badass monster wife to make her husband dance. The play is a now-historic look at even more historic tropes.

I’m not the only one who never gets tired of getting yet another look at these stories with the newest iteration of storytelling sensibilities. I mean, at this point, I’ve seen a lot of “new” takes on Shakespeare!

When I grew up, the Hot Current Take on Shakespeare was emphasizing how much of it easily transposed to modern drama. 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man, and even the anachronistic Shakespeare in Love all have a very particular delighted way of playing with the tropes, for instance. The Lion King gave us Hamlet for Kids. We also got dramas transposing the entire social culture of society upon street gangs in West Side Story.

Joel Cohen, sans the Other Cohen, expressed his appreciation for this most ancient story in a fascinatingly retrocontemporary style. The Tragedy of MacBeth is as much a love letter to the golden age of cinema as it is to theater, Shakespeare’s work, and the art of acting.

Visuals are compelling and minimalist. It looks like they filmed in a Los Angeles mansion, part brutalist concrete architecture and part Spanish colonial, but research* informed me that these were all sound stages. (*My research is “Rory told me they read it in an article.)

Perhaps Coen wanted old world of Macbeth to look like somewhere that a king might live in modern California, transposed onto the fashionably bleak surfaces. It reminds me of Old Hollywood. If Gene Kelly had tap-danced into the technicolor universe of Oz, he probably would have originated from this black-and-white palace instead of Dorothy’s Kansas farmland.

We never make it to Kansas. The world always feels very small, like you’re either sitting in a black box theater or Duncan was ruling from a walled enclave in the apocalypse. A snowglobe of staring trees, biting archways, and hollow hallways that hear every single whispered monologue. It starts small and it irises tight around MacBeth until he chokes.

Rory had an interesting observation about the extremely stark cinematography in this flick: it’s a lot like the effect the cinematographer of Villeneuve’s Dune sought to get across, except mostly with sandstone faces.

We both agree that it’s taken further, and more effective, in The Tragedy of MacBeth.

Committed performances from some of our generations greatest actors are, of course, fantastic. Just listening to Denzel purr, chuckle, bark, and menace his way through the character arc is a treat. If this was just an audiobook of Denzel Reads MacBeth, I’d be basically just as happy. It’s impossible not to love MacBeth early in the play, fraternally affable, just as it’s impossible to feel bad for him once he loses. And my God does the man deserve to lose.

Any of us could be swayed by the ravenous cruelty of Frances McDormand as Lady MacBeth, and we’d deserve to take the same fall that both of these characters do–literally, in her case. It’s stunning to watch her ambition build a fragile house of daggers around her husband, who is ill-suited to wear the crown, and then watch every single knife gash this woman to the bone as her house falls apart. Some actresses were just born for the role I guess. She kills.

Though none carry the dramatic responsibility so much as these two leads, the witches portrayed by Kathryn Hunter are a deeply unsettling modern dance act, and it’s sorta crazy that Moses Ingram brought so much character to Lady MacDuff with so little time. The actor playing her kid was soooo cute and seemed to be having fun, so I couldn’t get too mad about the MacDuffs getting offed, but the performance makes it seem extra-stupid for MacDuff to leave them behind. What a MacDick. I still rooted for him against Denzel though, and that’s saying something.

Generally, I guess, my favorite part is how well this movie really does interpret Shakespeare’s dialogue-only scripts in a way that makes the intrigue so clear. Every character feels well-understood. Their roles are defined. In the hands of Joel Cohen, an ancient story I’ve struggled to parse sometimes in the past becomes clear as Game of Thrones.

And I don’t even need the characters to be in high school, sarcastic, and dressed fashionably to care about the story anymore. I think that means we (myself, the culture) are growing up.

I posit there are really two ways you should watch this movie though:

For the first time, in a normal way, paying attention, enjoying how badass the story is and how great the performances are. The spacious sound design is eerie. The beating heart-type sounds drag you into madness right with MacBeth. This is a horror movie, and it’s incredible.

And then watch it a second time muted. No sound! Just visuals.

Look at the rhythms of the set design. Just as spacious and eerie as the sounds. As beautiful as paintings.

A rapture!

I love this damn movie.

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)