Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/21/25

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, February 21, 2025

Down With Love (Peyton Reed, 2003)

Cast: Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Sarah Paulson, David Hyde Pierce, Rachel Dratch, Jack Plotnick, Tony Randall, John Aylward, John Munson, Matt Ross, Michael Ensign, Timothy Omundson, Jeri Ryan. Screenplay: Eve Ahlert, Dennis Drake. Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth. Production design: Andrew Laws. Film editing: Larry Bock. Music: Marc Shaiman.

From its retro opening credits to its boy/girl gets girl/boy finale, Down With Love is a spot-on parody of 1960s rom-coms, specifically the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies epitomized by Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959). Its aim is to spotlight modern attitudes toward sex, romance, and marriage by showing us the way we were only 40 years earlier -- which means, too, that the parody itself looks a little dated 20-some years after its release. Critics liked Down With Love, audiences not so much, perhaps because you had to be steeped in those '60s movies to fully appreciate some of its gags. Like the original films, it's full of double entendres, including the split-screen effect that in Pillow Talk had Doris and Rock on screen in their separate apartment bathtubs, so that at one point it looked like the two of them were playing footsie. Down With Love's verbal and visual double entendres are, naturally, much raunchier than Pillow Talk's, which now seem quaintly innocent. The parody goes on for too long, so that some fatigue has set in by the time the film reaches its cleverest point, a denouement that consists of an extended speech delivered by Renée Zellweger's character that both recaps and upends everything we've seen. Zellweger and Ewan McGregor don't have the chemistry that Day and Hudson have, but it doesn't matter, because we're not supposed to take their attraction seriously. David Hyde Pierce gets the Tony Randall role in the film, the neurotic sidekick to McGregor's character, but an appearance by Randall himself in a cameo role unfortunately reveals how much better in the part he was.