Say Anything Still Works

-
Watched Cameron Crowe's Say Anything last night for the first time in about fifteen years. I am trying to decide if it's a feminist film or not. It's one of the few teen movies where the guy is totally willing to give up everything for the girl and the girl is the one who has big plans. In this movie, she's the valedictorian and she has earned a fellowship to study in London. Conversely, Lloyd isn't sure what he wants to do (aside from not want to "sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career"). His main goal in life is to be the boyfriend of Diane Court. He's Lloyd Dobler, as played by the long-eyelashed, super tall John Cusack, who I have a fondness for because he's a native Chicagoan and because I also like his sister, actress Joan Cusack, especially her green-eye-shadowed character in Working Girl. 

There was a spat of these "unpopular guy gets popular girl" films in the 80s, like Patrick Dempsey's Can't Buy Me Love and Eric Stoltz in the one with Amanda Jones...Oh, Some Kind of Wonderful. Essentially, they all run something like this: unpopular or unknown guy gets super hot girl, who discovers that he's way better than the dumb jocks she's been dating.

But Say Anything is somewhat different because it's not that Lloyd is unpopular, it's just that he's not in her league. He's older, and has no plans for college. He lives with his sister, his parents are nowhere to be found, and he likes to kick box. Diane is the one with the future and the plans and the brains. They have this great kiss in the rain where he's super tall and they're both soaking wet and he's got his hands tangled in her hair and then there's this other sweet moment right after the first time he sleeps with her that he's shaking but denying it, but still shaking and he says it's because he's happy. 

Of course, there's also the fact that he keeps saving her, kind of, making sure she's safe at the party, that she doesn't step on glass on the sidewalk, that she can travel to London without freaking out on the plane, and he's this replacement dad figure, because, in an unexpected and possibly unnecessary plot twist, Diane's dad (played by the guy who was Frasier's dad in the show) turns out to be a crook, embezzling from his elderly clientele. And still. And still, it has this amazing Lily Taylor as his best friend who writes countless songs about her ex boyfriend, and who rejects him when he wants to get back together and she doesn't end up with someone else and that's okay and there is not sexual tension between her and him, and that's okay too, they're friends and she thinks he's amazing and that's it.

Then again, is it stalking to leave eight voice messages and stand outside a girl's window blasting Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes?" Naw, it's not too bad. "I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more