| Something in your eyes says "maybe" / That's "never" / Never Say "Never" or, "Spa King!" |
[Aug. 30th, 2007|02:09 am] |
So, many hours ago now, the s.o. and I somehow got to talking about the difference between good Madonna movies and bad Madonna movies* and concluded that the good Madonna movies, all two of them**, were going to be made anyway and she just got a part in them. The bad ones? Were Madonna vehicles. Example? Desperately Seeking Susan, while it certainly gave her a showcase, was something she auditioned for. Then, someone thought, "let's redo that and make more money!" And "Who's That Girl?" was misbegotten. Think about it. "Who's That Girl?" would have been a good alternative title for Susan because the whole movie was about Rosanna Arquette trying to figure out who she was by figuring out who Susan was. And in both movies, Madonna plays a somewhat quirky character in NYC who is involved a crime caper of sorts. That is about where the similarities of both movie and lead character end.
Susan, of course, is one of the great feminist role models in cinema. She is smart, confident, savvy, has a great individual sense of style and insists everyone take her or leave her on her own terms, and she has a very interesting and unusual way of dealing with the world. The lead in the other movie talks like Betty Boop, has a more risque version of a 30's/40's starlet look that somehow manages to make Madonna look hideous, and is a complete ditz.
Other significant differences (besides little things like interesting vs. boring characters & relationships, pacing, acting, writing, directing, lighting, etc) are Susan's vibrant, genuinely authentic sense of the 80's alternative scene in NYC (and Sasha was there, so she should know) vs the typical bland movie b.s. setting of WTG; the caper in Susan actually making sense, at least in terms of the movie's internal logic; a subversion of typical gender roles that most people won't even notice, thus making the subversion all the better; and Susan actually being *about* something, even aside from the charming plot.
Which got us into how Susan was part of (possibly the first in, can't remember dates on all of them) a whole little genre of 80's movies that were basically about more or less boring yuppie types seeking out something more meaningful***; two that seemed particularly Susan-ish were the dark comedy/drama's Something Wild and After Hours. **** & ***** I really can't get into too much of that conversation w/out giving away plot developments, but suffice to say Wild took that premise w/Susan's romantic & criminal elements, and AH took it and *really* got into the NYC after-hours scene.
Thinking later, like now, I'm not sure why Sasha loves/remembers these movies so well. But for me, it occurs to me that the growth process of the Rosanna Arquette/Jeff Daniels/Griffin Dunne characters in those movies was pretty much how I tried to live my post-high school life. Granted that people told me I was a bit weird from about age 11 onward, I was a pretty standard whitebread middle class preppy/nerd/jock in high school, and kept at least the trappings all the way through college and beyond. But like the characters in those movies, I never really wanted a boring normal career track, or particularly cared about a normal life. Seriously, for those of you getting out of college now? The bad news is, most jobs really are as boring as you think they'll be. Then again w/the me being the poster child for a.d.d., so ymmv. And unlike the characters in those movies, I never really went on a normal career track for more than a few fits and starts. I mean, the first post-college job I applied for was the CIA, right before I started my senior year in college, because I thought it would be fun to legally break into buildings and I was attracted to the idea of finding out / stealing secrets. ******
I may have hit adulthood during the "greed is good" decade, but as far back as high school, I was more into the sense of this deeper reality, and discovering what it was. Much--most--of the first, oh, 30 years of my life was primarily about that. I never found a literal deeper reality that I could walk into like the Black/White Lodge in Twin Peaks, or anything, but I do think I managed to get a deeper perspective on this reality and a bunch of different strains of it and how they all tie together.
And I was gonna say more but it's really late and not sure how much anyone cares about further biographical info as tied into views on different types of jobs, abnormal career patterns, mysticism, things that aren't mysticism but are just as important (arguably moreso if you think the mysticism is a dead end/misperception), and themes from movies.
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*actual geneaology of this conversation, as far back as I can remember: a particular thing I disliked about Deathly Hallows to names of the Weasley kids to awful names to get stuck w/in the series to Dudley Moore to this hilarious scene in Foul Play to Goldie Hawn movies to how awful Overboard was and the sheer stupidity of remaking Swept Away as a comedy to wondering what was up w/Madonna's taste in movies, along w/a side of trying to remember if Dudley or Griffin Dunne was in Who's That Girl?, for what it's worth, and isn't it weird that Griffin Dunne showed up later in the conversation?)
** that would be Desperately Seeking Susan and A League of Their Own, and not counting Truth or Dare, as it is a documentary and we couldn't agree which category it belonged in, me liking it and Sasha not so much
*** & Sasha added something about why no one seemed to be making movies like that now and in some ways the current overall climate is actually worse than in the 80's, which is kinda horrifying, but I was off on a mental tangent and didn't realize what she said until after it was over and am foggy on the details; I can have whole conversations this way, which can be useful or problematic, depending; obviously problematic here, as she's been impatient w/me doing this so much lately so I didn't ask her what she said that I missed.
**** See? I told you Griffin Dunne would show up again!
***** We also got into discussing Susan Siedelman's Smithereens, her pre-Susan feature, which is really good and I highly recommend, and which vaguely relates to After Hours in that they're both in NYC, and it is as depressing as After Hours would have been if it had kept what I'm told was the original ending. As these other movies capture the happy bohemian side of the NYC alt scene, Smithereens captures the Lou Reed-on-downers everything-going-to-hell side, sorta. *******
****** I got past the first battery of tests and won regional approval for hiring despite missing my interview, but then got turned down w/out further notice by the national office, which was followed by a very nice letter from the regional recruiter about how much he enjoyed talking to me. Either they were very disorganized or the guy I thought was an older (30-ish) student I talked to when we were taking all the tests was an undercover interviewer; he certainly knew more than I did about breaking into places -- how you would go about doing this was one of the questions on one of the tests and we talked about it at break; he thought my answer was good in a general way but lacking in specifics--it turned out he used to do this for a living before and during much of college. Possible reasons for my not getting hired were a GPA that was really pathetic -- I never have not finished in the top 1% of a standardized test including graduate school ones--usually *way* toward the top of that top 1% but was not in the top 60% of my undergrad class; admitting to minor drug use; saying I would consider turning down employment unless I got to work in the field and wanted high risk assignments--i.e. yay clandestine service! no image analyst job wanted--but would consider refusing any assignment where I had to kill someone may have struck them as overly picky and impractical; I suck at foreign languages; missing that interview; they realized I was the kind of person who would ignore the instructions not to tell anyone we applied for the job and write about it online 20 years later; or the time my then-girlfriend and I started wondering if they conducted surveillance on applicants and decided to have sex on the balcony--I mention that not as a joke but because the rejection letter came about a week after that. =)
******* Not so much like these movies, but on the same general tack, Neighbors and the teen movie Reckless; they so inspired me that after watching them back to back one night, I left my college apartment and drove for hours, intending to hit Gulf of Mexico at some point. Then I changed my mind and got home about an hour before my first class, and went to Intro to Philosophy for the first time in about six weeks. And then carried the discussion because no one else was answering any of the prof's questions until I said something that tipped him off I hadn't done the reading. I wound up a philosophy minor, for what it's worth, and loved the reading when I made time to do it, I just tended towards the nocturnal and rarely awoke before mid-afternoon. |
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