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)

Dear Aunt Sara:

I’ve got a real problem. My (27m) wedding to a beautiful woman (20f) is coming up in a few days. I wanted to give my best friend (27f) plenty of time to prepare herself for the wedding. Not because we’ve been in a nonmonogamous relationship for nine years and she deserves to know, but because I expect her to be happy for the loss of this intimate “friend” relationship with dirty talk, flirting, and dating.

But BFF is here, and she acts like she’s into me when I flagrantly hit on her. I’ve told my Fiancee’s entire family that I’ve got like, the biggest boner for this lady, and so the family is teasing her and belittling Fiancee all the time. BFF is just being so weird about it!

Now Fiancee is acting crazy too. I think she wants to give me a lucrative, stable job that would meet her needs as well as mine, the bitch. That’s not why I scooped up a girl in college and planned to rip her out of her life in order to completely service mine! We agreed she would never have needs. She would always be a doormat. But again, she’s acting weird about my hot BFF I’ve been having flirty phone sexy times with for the better part of a decade, and that’s just neurotic. Women, right?

Anyway, the question: BFF kissed me right before the wedding and confessed she’s in love. Fiancee is shattered. I guess I just need to know, truly, girls crazy, right? I’m an absolute innocent in this. My therapist did mention something about how clear communication and appropriate boundaries from the start would have prevented the whole thing, but my therapist is a woman too so idk. How do I recover this whole thing where I deserve to have anything I want, all the time, without consequences, including a tender embrace with BFF at my own wedding?

– Smoldering Without Boundaries

Dear SWB,

Die in a fire.

~Aunt Sara

(image credit: Sony Pictures Studios)

I could have given the exact same one-sentence review to this that I did to Elemental. “It feels like a really beautiful heartfelt iteration of a movie I have seen a whole lot.”

In both cases, this is not a complaint or criticism, but the most honest way I can express the approach to the tropes of their format.

Blue Beetle feels extremely familiar the way the worn carpet in your mom’s bedroom feels familiar, or the way it’s familiar to snuggle against her chest for a hug, even though you’re now six feet tall and must bend down halfway to reach her.

This is the feeling of home: a comforting place where you have been since childhood.

This is comic books.

The way that Western comic books visit and revisit the same characters, superhero identities, and plot arcs repeatedly is akin to myth. We have made mythic stories out of their journeys that transcend the individual parts of media and invite everyone to reinterpret these myths in their own ways.

What seems to differentiate Blue Beetle from comparables, like all the Spider-Man origin movies, is the fact that we’ve put a Latino family in the center of it. Blue Beetle is a family story; Jaime might be the recipient of this alien tech making him a superhero, but his entire family supports him on this adventure.

The family felt familiar, too. If I had sat down with my husband (not Latino, but from a sprawling Italian American family) to riff on how they might react to seeing him overtaken by some insectlike superhero powers, I would have come up with some of the jokes in this movie. I couldn’t have come up with all of them because I’m not that funny. I love the physical comedy!

It’s as though someone took a big ol’ paint-by-numbers kit for Superhero Origin Stories, then threw out whatever paint came with it, and made it into a gorgeous collage of Jaime Reyes’s family history in the style of your family, my neighbor’s family, the families in my neighborhood growing up.

Though a lot of Blue Beetle is giddyingly, childishly funny, the heightened comic book emotions also cover grief (it’s a hero cycle, after all) and action, spending amounts of time in each emotion that feel wholly unnecessary to me, but are wholly appropriate for the format. Again: This *is* indeed the comic books of your childhood, with lots of peril, action, and drama.

It’s fun to see such a sterling example of It’s Not Concept but Execution, which I think all the actors understood. They put their whole guts into their performances. Even Susan Sarandon knows she’s just here to play an evil Karen comic book villain, and she goes whole-hog on the cackling one-dimensional cruelty, which is perfect.

You probably know if you enjoy this level of stylization; I’d say this movie has most value if you’ve got kids the right age to watch along with them

It’s a shame that DCU’s choices means that we can’t get more beautiful pieces of cinema that *loves* their characters as deeply as Blue Beetle loves its central family. I’d be delighted to have a whole movie about Nana gunning down imperials. If Alfred can get a show, why not Nana?

(Banner image credit: Warner Bros Pictures)

Hello from the year 1999.

I have only ever seen this movie the way God intended it: on two VHS tapes that are so tight in their printed cardboard box that they give a gently vibrating vwoop sliding out of the case, along with a puff of plastic smell.

The second tape got mangled in a VHS player when we were trying to do a speedy rewind, but it’s okay. Mostly because I held up the tape to the light and sort of absorbed the second half via light osmosis. But also because the second half is all Action Movie Titanic (or so I’m told) and that’s very stressful for me.

Luckily of course the first VHS is the Good VHS and that’s the only one we must regard for this viewing.

It is amazing how gorgeous the costuming is, as far as I can tell on my CRT television. Sometimes I get close enough that the static tickles my nose and I can smell ozone but I see more details. The embroidery on Rose’s dresses are amazing. The Titanic sets are incredibly realistic to history.

That boy who plays Jack seems a little arrogant but I am sure that such a lush period piece centering his beauty will do nothing to his ego over the course of his career. Maybe I should check in on him?

The love affair with the pretty redheaded actress is very good and sweet. Boy, does their charisma work. That Leonardo Dicaprio sure knew how to have chemistry with a 22-year-old woman! He’s surely grown out of that more than twenty-five years later.

The obvious greatest performance comes from Billy Zane, who I am SO CONFIDENT will be the major breakout star of the film. His anger is incandescent. He looks like he wants to eat Jack half the time. He knows how to wear a suit. Yes, Billy Zane is going places, even if he has to eat a bit of crow right at the Actual End of the Movie when he realizes Jack and Rose are together.

Also the ship bumps into a big chunk of ice at the end of Titanic, but right before it cuts off, they’re looking at some blueprints, so it’s probably fine. I bet they spend the last hour and a half fixing it. Maybe they reunite Old Rose with Old Jack? That’s the only thing that makes sense really.

(Image credit: 20th Century Fox)

Is any movie more 1995 than Clueless? With a movie as witty, colorful, and fashionable as the nineties themselves, Clueless is one of those movies that I doubt will ever age.

Normally something so anachronistic would age, and badly, but Clueless taps into the same essential core of human existence as Emma by Jane Austen with an extremely effective modernized adaptation. I don’t think Jane Austen adaptations will ever die either (I sure hope they won’t).

Young women have always been something magical, which is really one of the many delightful things that Jane Austen captures in her stories. Girls can be smart, observant, funny, feisty, and opinionated, when the circumstances and adults in the vicinity allow them to be, and she’s so good at giving us women who have been indulged by a loving parent to the point where they blossom into their fullest selves.

That’s Cher here, indulged by her dad, born into a position of privilege (a lawyer’s daughter can afford to be fancy). Is she spoiled? Maybe a little bit, but Cher has such principles that you have to respect it. She will argue her way to getting anything she want. She isn’t afraid of making demands. And her demands are kind because she is kind. Try being Paul Rudd and *not* falling for your adorable sister with spicy social justice aspirations.

Wait, did I mention Paul Rudd? The man who gave an entire generation a fetish for the hot older step-brother we never had?

It’s so cute to see him here, looking only slightly shinier-faced than he does thirty years later. He’s supposed to be the kinda cool college guy. Paul Rudd is a lot of things, including adorable, but I don’t think coolguy stayed in his brand as an actor, and that’s why we love him. Well, and because the faces he makes when he’s falling for Cher are to-die-for, and we all want Paul Rudd to make those faces at us.

I guess it says a lot more about me, and where I am in my life, that my main reaction to *this* watch of Clueless was, “Oh my God everyone is so cute.” Because that’s my reaction to everyone and everything! It’s so cute!

Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd? OBVIOUSLY cute.

Donald Faison? So! Cute!

The grand Nagus marrying his nerdy teacher colleague? CUTE!

I can’t talk about how cute Brittany Murphy is without breaking into tears!

The fashion? Cuuuuuute.

Speaking of fashion, let’s talk 1995. What a year for cinema! I didn’t realize Clueless was the same year as Sabrina at first. It’s funny because I referenced the hot older step brother in my review for Sabrina. I thought that Linus should have been cast to feel like an older brother figure to Sabrina, and failing that, the script rewritten. What was in the water in 1995? Hot brother/daddy figures? I guess that explains where all my weird fetishes came from. Thanks 1995!

Anyhoo, 1995 also gave us Strange Days (very notable if not a GREAT movie), To Wong Foo, While You Were Sleeping (it’s on my to-watch list), Showgirls, Braveheart, and one of the disappointing favorites of my childhood, Pocahontas. What a vibrant year for memorable media.

Clueless stands apart from its release-year peers by being an especially wholesome embrace of girlhood and friendship and hot stepbrothers. May it never lose its shine.

The year is 2145. Neflixxar releases The Princess Switch 30X: Princesses In The Tenth Dimension. You can only view it by downloading it into your processor and the processor of your seven clones, which will allow you to act out the plot in real-time. Such is the Prophecy of the Switching Princesses: As the Switches gain more episodes, so too must the convolution of the Switches intensify.

Sounds good to you? Then I’m sad to say the third movie in this franchise will disappoint you.

The third Princess Switch actually gives us zero new princesses and I *think* there is less mistaken identity than in the second one.

I thought our over-the-top villainess Hudgens in PS2 might have been like the thunder before a real camp storm. Sure, my ideal logarithmic growth of Hudgens isn’t realistic, but shouldn’t TPS3 have included at least *one* more Vanessa Hudgens? I mean, really pushing this concept of a family that squirts out Vanessa Hudgens clones into the next century.

Instead, PS3 is a very low-temperature and low-stakes romantic suspense story about Villainess Hudgens slowly losing her camp potential to the march of heteronormativity and the hivemind-like placidity of the Hudgens Multiverse Family.

I wish that they would lean into the fun, fanciful elements of the franchise rather than trying to give us Emotions over the complicated childhood a wealthy, never-sees-prison villain feels toward her mom. The silly accent doesn’t offer much room for a nuanced performance, though Hudgens tries. My God does this woman try.

The element of this whole Switchery franchise to which Netflix committed is the fact that they evade anything interesting, giving us no more than the barest glimpse of more exciting ideas. If you’re on medically mandated bed rest, this is the franchise to keep that heart rate low.

It almost frustrates me *more* to have a fun sequence like Third Hudgens dodging lasers paralleling Second Hudgens doing the tango. She/they is so hot. And the easy cuts between scenes to create a simple visual metaphor reminds me that there are actually talented people making these movies, who totally know what they’re doing, but someone from Netflix is standing over them with a sandblaster ready to fire if they start enjoying themselves too much. “No! We saw her thigh! Someone’s eyes widened when she wore a wig! We have met our sexuality cap!”

I get impatient with movies that are *almost* good because I kinda wish they’d either commit to batshittery (hence: more fun) or shoot lower (like A Christmas Prince, which gave me almost no emotions whatsoever).

Everything in this franchise would be redeemed by making up one excuse for two Vanessa Hudgens making out. That’s my Christmas Wish.