Popcorn Kernels: Funny Girls

In which we dole out mini-reviews to two female-led comedies, released 30 years apart. Let’s see how things have changed, shall we?

Valley Girl

Year: 1983

Director: Martha Coolidge

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Deborah Foreman, Elizabeth Daily

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A girl from the Valley falls for an LA dude with a bitchin’ bod, but her friends think he’s, like, totally grody. Will she choose him or get back with her old beau, Tommy?

I feel like such a traitor to the cause. Like, every cause. As a staunch feminist and an 80’s movie advocate, I’m always delighted when I find out that a classic high school movie was actually directed by a woman. But Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemeont High failed to wow me, and now Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl has suffered a similar fate. Obviously, this has everything to do with the state of second-tier 80’s teen flicks and not women in the director’s chair, but I can’t help feeling like a heretic.

At least with Valley Girl, I can see why it became such a zeitgeisty hit, and it’s not just Phoebe Cates misplacing her bikini top. Simultaneously canonizing a parade of 80’s megahits, including Modern English’s evergreen “Melt with You” and calling into existence an entire lexicon of slang like an omnipotent pop culture deity, Valley Girl struck teen culture during a pivotal transition period. As a cultural artifact, it’s pristine, but as an actual piece of film narrative, it’s a major bummer.

Copping the classical “forbidden love” story arc so hard that our couple literally makes out in front of a movie theater marquee advertising Romeo and Juliet, Valley Girl assumes that the drama is baked in automatically and doesn’t actually bother to create its own meaningful conflict. It’s hard to care about a relationship that has lasted the course of a montage, but it’s even harder to believe that Julie’s decision is challenging in any way, because Tommy is such a collar-popping Cobra Kai asshole that it’s literally impossible to imagine that anyone would even give him the time of day without smacking that smug grin off his greasy face.

Plus, Nicolas Cage is obscenely attractive at 19 years old. He might be giving a performance bizarrely reminiscent of David Schwimmer, but he’s got the goods, and that’s something I never thought I’d say about the star of the National Treasure franchise. This extremely superficial narrative (which expends a lot of energy trying to emphasize how “different” this white dude from 20 miles away is) can’t even pick up on that, which is immensely frustrating.

The film’s emphasis on vérité conversational scenes that meander through halfheartedly improvised dialogue while straining to grab guerilla snatches of downtown LA betray its low budget, as does its lack of proper nighttime lighting. Far be it from me to punish a movie for being cheap, but it doesn’t cost money to punch up the script a little more. A whole lot of nothing happens in Valley Girl, and it takes forever to do it. 

I admire its veracity as an on-the-ground examination of the totally arbitrary class warfare of teen culture, but Deborah Foreman is a deeply uninteresting lead (her second biggest credit is the forgotten 1986 slasher April Fool’s Day, in which she’s also the least interesting presence), the story is lazy, and just like Ridgemont High, the film is packed with side characters and subplots that we spend an arbitrary amount of time with before they vanish. At least we’ll always have Nic Cage’s eyebrows.

Rating: 5/10

I Give It a Year

Year: 2013

Director: Dan Mazer

Cast: Rose Byrne, Rafe Spall, Anna Faris

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A newlywed couple struggles to make it through their first year of marriage, both presented with temptations in the form of romantic partners far better suited for them.

I Give it a Year is a curious beast. A small British alterna-rom-com nestled in the underbrush of the Netflix catalogue, you’d think you know exactly what you’re getting. And that’s what you get: A Spartan narrative with few twists and turns, a half-cynical but still heteronormative-monogamous takedown of love and marriage, and a revolving door of broad comedy stock characters. So why did I find it so f**king delightful?

Well, ingredient number one is Rose Byrne, a vastly underrated comedy actress who I would follow to the ends of the Earth. Hell, I would watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop in Space if she was in it. She has an uncanny ability to take an extremely sour character, sharpen her to a deadly steel point of hilarity, and swoop in with her natural charisma to tie you down and force you to care for her anyway. She handles all the film’s copious negativity with charm and grace, keeping the tone light and airy.

That’s not to say the rest of the cast don’t pull their weight. I mean, Anna Faris is in this movie. Her character is probably the most flat on paper, but she grabs her nebbish role by the horns to craft a lived-in character with more dimensions than scenes. And in the wings are the male leads; Rafe Spall to play cavalry with dunderheaded charm and physical comedy, and Simon Baker to project handsomeness and overconfidence all over the place like a fire hose.

Surround this cast with a battalion of British character actors, and you’ve got yourself an unforgettable movie. I Give it a Year is simple, sleek, unadorned, and pretty hilarious. It’s no classical masterpiece of the form, but it’s a ridiculously fun time that I would recommend to anybody who fancies themselves edgy and cynical, but is still a soggy romantic at heart.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 961

New Year's Resolutions: Yuk Yuk Yuck

Who’s ready for a tsunami of white posters? Here’s a heaping platter of mini reviews for comedy films I screened in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Miss Congeniality

Year: 2000

Director: Donald Petrie

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A tomboyish FBI agent is given a makeover to go undercover and stop a terrorist attack on the Miss USA pageant.

What is there that I can possibly say about Miss Congeniality that could contribute to the conversation? See, there’s the trouble with comedies. You know what you’re going to get and you get it. It works or it doesn’t work, but only in a very finite number of combinations. Sandra Bullock is a charmer as an FBI agent so flamboyantly tomboyish that she doesn’t own a brush I mean, come on. I’m as macho as they come and I own a brush. Don’t fact check that.), her sassy gay mentor can’t figure out how he could possibly make her beautiful despite the fact that she looks like goddamn Sandra Bullock, and she finds a balance between love and work. It’s funny. Bada bing, bada boom.

The truly interesting thing about Miss Congeniality is the gender politics that form the story’s backbone. At its heart, the film is a story about a woman learning to love other women and accepting that traditional femininity is a valid choice, even if it’s not one that she personally wishes to make. More than romance or action sequences (of which there are a surprising amount of the latter), the film focuses on female friendship, which is always a welcome addition to any comedy, especially such a humorous fish-out-of-water extravaganza.

Rating: 8/10

Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous

Year: 2005

Director: John Pasquin

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Regina King, William Shatner 

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Gracie Hart is now the public face of the FBI, but she struggles against the organization’s restraints when her friend, the former Miss U.S.A., is kidnapped.

First and foremost, I would like to commend Miss Congeniality 2 for forgoing the typical comedy sequel route. It could very easily have been, “Gracie! We need you to go undercover at the Miss Universe Pageant in Acapulco! It’s bigger so it’s funnier!” However, instead of that claptrap, this film continues the universe of the original in a realistic and satisfying way. There is no pageant this time, because there’s no way such a high profile mission could actually be repeated, but the skills and friends that Gracie made there must come into play again, all with the undercurrent of women from different walks of life forming bonds: this time in the shape of a buddy cop story between Gracie and an aggressive new recruit.

The comedy itself is broader and glitzier, and never quite as effective, but as a story continuation it’s satisfying as hell. Drag shows, celebrity cameos, and old lady shtick prevent Miss Congeniality 2 from launching itself above the lowest common denominator, but strong women are once again front and center in this action-comedy, so it ain’t all bad. Plus they save their absolute worst tawdry callback to the original film until the final scene, so there’s plenty of goodwill saved up to cancel it out. All in all, it’s not a film I’ll ever feel the need to watch again, but I’m not sorry I saw it in the first place.

Rating: 6/10

Ghost Town

Year: 2008

Director: David Koepp

Cast: Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear, Téa Leoni 

Run Time:  1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A misanthropic dentist briefly dies during a botched surgery and discovers that he can now see ghosts. He reluctantly agrees to help one out in exchange for being left alone and ends up falling for his newly engaged widow.

As you can probably tell, this is pretty much a comedy remake of The Sixth Sense, one of my favorite horror movies. I find no shame in admitting that, as a result, Ghost Town is one of my favorite comedies. They’re also two of the only movies that make me cry every time. I feel like with those last three sentences, I have given you a pretty deep glimpse into my soul. Geez, buy me a drink first.

Giving Greg Kinnear his Jason Bateman The Gift role, in which he finally embraces the fact that his stock character is kind of an asshole, Ghost Town matches his acid-tongued charms with the professional curmudgeonry of Ricky Gervais. It’s a match made in Hell, and these two awful people bounce off one another until they slowly learn what it means to be human. It’s a typical comedy setup, really, but with a fantastically offbeat cast. Throw in Téa Leoni as the begrudging love interest and Kristen Wiig as a vacant surgeon and you have an utterly unforgettable ensemble.

The comedy isn’t flash-bang, light up the room funny, but it’s never a dud, always hitting its marks with idiosyncratic charisma. As delivered by its stunning cast, it presents an emotionally valid storyline that vies for subtle humanism over grand romantic overtures. Plus, it probably has the best soundtrack of the century (Drive would probably be a close second). I love this movie, perhaps way more than anybody else in the entire world, but that’s fine. If you want to experience life through my eyes for 90 minutes, pop this movie on and bask in the glow.

Rating: 10/10

What's Your Number?

Year: 2011

Director: Mark Mylod

Cast: Anna Faris, Chris Evans, Ari Graynor

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A woman who has slept with 20 men finds out that women with over 20 sexual partners rarely find their soulmate. She teams up with her lothario neighbor to track down her exes and see if they’re The One because she has already hit her ceiling.

For totally safe, female-led sex comedies, What’s Your Number? is totally adequate. It ticks all the boxes to be what it needs to be without striving for something more. Imminent wedding of a close friend/relative? Check. Kitschy hobby that’s more satisfying than actual job, but she only needs a push to make it a career? Checkaroony. Somehow affording an enormous apartment on literally no salary? Hell yeah, that’s a check. Two people who don’t realize they’re perfect for each other until the very end? Ding ding ding! We have a winner. And don’t you dare complain that that’s a spoiler. You literally don’t need to have seen a single movie in your life to predict the end of What’s Your Number?.

Its two main functions, both of which is performs with mechanical perfection, are to provide a heaping hors d'oeuvre tray of man meat courtesy of Chris Evans (who graciously braves the cold every other scene) and give a showcase to Anna Faris’ ever-underappreciated talents. Faris and Chris Evans(’ torso) are both served well, but the thin script holding them up sags a bit in the middle, like a generic brand paper towel in one of those comparison commercials. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but it’s charming and has font jokes, so it’s an at least tolerable good time.

Rating: 6/10

Sex and the City

Year: 2008

Director: Michael Patrick King

Cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon

Run Time: 2 hours 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Carrie Bradshaw and her friend continue to struggle with the responsibilities of life, love, work, and sex… in the city.

Sex and the City was a huge hit, so it was no surprise when it was bestowed with one of TV’s very rare movie continuations, four years after it went off the air. What is surprising is that director/writer Michael Patrick King attempts to jam an entire season’s worth of material into the feature, leaving it teetering with a bloated and unwieldy 2 ½ hour runtime. In sitcom format, Sex and the City is a sprightly watch, but at this staggering volume, the flaws of the show become concentrated into one punishing punchbowl of pain.

Our tacky materialistic single gal Carrie Bradshaw is now a tacky, materialistic engaged gal, and she calls upon her far more interesting friends to coo and fawn over her while suppressing their vomit at the sight of the mammoth plastic flower she has grafted to her sternum. You can tell that they’re matured since the show’s finale, because sometimes there’s a toddler in a high chair shoved into the corner of the frame. 

While her friends deal with a variety of realistic human problems (well, Miranda and Sam at least deal with spousal betrayal, sexual dry spells, and unsatisfying relationships. Charlotte has a series of successes quietly in the corner and resurfaces every once in a while to chirp and make shocked faces over lavishly overpriced lunches), Carrie whines about having the wrong area code and wrecks her relationship because this movie needs a plot.

Sex and the City is greeting card comedy for miserable white 40-somethings, at least whenever Carrie is around. The only recognizable jokes she makes come in the form of truly ludicrous brand name-dropping and self-centered bleating. Cut her out of the movie and it would be a sultry breeze. But alas, that’s the one thing that’s never going to happen, so we’re stuck with this interminable Titanic of nauseating commercialism.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1565

Reviews In This Series

Sex and the City (King, 2008)

Sex and the City 2 (King, 2010)