Filmic Measures: The Dinner Table Rule

The Dinner Table Rule came about many long years ago when I was writing a review for the forgettable Owen Wilson/Matt Dillon/Kate Hudson comedy You, Me & Dupree. In the closing paragraph of said review I noted that I thought in order for mainstream comedies to work they have to feature characters who you'd feel comfortable enough inviting into your home to sit at your dinner table. "I wouldn't invite Dupree to my table," I wrote. "I don't know if he'd make it or burn it down."

Then, yesterday, when writing about Bad Teacher, I remembered the dinner table rule again. I wouldn't invite Cameron Diaz's Elizabeth to my table either. She's too selfish and self centered. She'd simply take advantage. Now think of the comparison I made for that movie with Bad Santa. I'd be more than happy to have Billy Bob Thorton's Willy over for dinner. There's a lot of things I'd like to ask him about. There is, after all, something kind of morbidly sweet in the affection he feels for the kid who presents him with a wooden pickle covered in his own blood for Christmas.

You see the Dinner Table Rule doesn't necessarily mean that you like the person you'd invite over (although it helps). It means that there has to be enough human depth presented in a character to intrigue you to want to learn more. Thorton isn't a nice guy in Bad Santa, but he's not a bad guy either. He's just a bum who's never had an outlet to give a damn about anything before. He is, in his own special way, still capable of good. I'd like to talk to him about that.

But Dupree was a lose cannon and Matt Dillon's affection for him was inexplicable. He screwed up everything he touched. Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher simply exploited every situation she was faced with for her own personal gain. And if any of those old hags from Sex and the City ever come around my neighbourhood I'm putting the whole house on lock down.

But how fun would it be to sit down with Emma Stone in Easy A or just about every movie she's been in, or Ryan Gosling from Crazy Stupid Love, Steve Carell from Dan in Real Life or even Jason Biggs from American Pie? Would anyone reject the opportunity to sit down for a meal with any character from John Hughes' classic 80s teen comedies? And let me tell you, if Loyld Dobler from Say Anything ever swung by I'm not sure I'd ever let him leave.

The point is that a dinner is personal. It's to be shared with people we known and who interest us. We don't let any random stranger off the street into our house. We invite the people over who we want to share an intimate setting with where we can engage in fun banter as well as get to know each other better. The characters thus, that we would invite over, are the ones who have connected with something in us on the human level. We see some of ourselves in them and they've shared something personal with us through their respective films. We want to know more, maybe even be friends.

That's what mainstream comedy needs. It needs to feel like we are being invited into a world and sharing a comedic situation with someone we could see ourselves liking in real life. We want to see good things happening to good people because we're good people as well. We wouldn't invite over the hopeless cynics, the selfish morons or the guys just trying to get laid. Sure, Billy Bob might eat all the chocolate from the advent calender, try to find the hidden safe and take advantage of my kindness, but he would also not fail to get me the Christmas present that I want, even if it is covered in his own blood.

The Golden Globes 2011 Plus a Celebrity Connection

To all the people who spend weeks and/or months writing about awards shows in advance, making predictions, guessing who will what to whom and when and live blogging and all that jazz, well I am not for you, or you are not for me, or however Shakespeare put it. In other words, to this mind, it's kind of a waste of time. Of course awards shows are fun to watch and talk about for about five minutes after the fact, but other than that, who cares? Like year end lists, awards don't represent what the Best Movie of the year is. How could it, there is, to quote William Goldman, no such thing; simply the reflection of which movie a group of people decided they liked more than the others. But regardless, while I should really be finishing that Rabbit Hole review or working at becoming a better critic, here's my 2 cents on what happened last night:

• Jason Segel, my favourite comedic leading man, got the biggest laugh of the red carpet when he did a rendition of Meat Loaf's I Would do Anything for Love. When a Jim Steinman musical finally happens, if ever, I vote Segel in the lead.
• Some have praised Ricky Gervais for mocking a ridiculous institution to it's face but I don't know, his routine throughout the night felt more like simply an amplification of last year. He tried to be quicker and more offensive while forgetting to be clever or laugh-out-loud hilarious and most of his targets were easy ones. The Charlie Sheen joke was Letterman grade stuff, suggesting the Hollywood Foreign Press take bribes was funny when he did it last year and really, Robert Downey Jr. rehab jokes jumped the shark when Downey announced the best special effects category at the Oscars a couple years ago. My vote for next year: Joan Rivers.
• Speaking of Downey, he stole the show, as expected, with a line to Gervais, ""Aside from the fact that it's been hugely mean-spirited, with mildly sinister undertones, I'd say the vibe of the show is pretty good so far, wouldn't you?" And then went on with an introduction that started off funny and dragged on longer than it should have. 
• The only movie that deserved recognition, The Kids Are All Right won for best Picture - Comedy. Really, was The Tourist, Red or Burlesque better than Morning Glory, Hot Tub Time Machine or Easy A? 
• Clair Danes won for her performance in Temple Grandin and it was sweet to see the real Temple sitting there with her and yet all I could think of was how William Goldman said that his academy vote will never go to "alcoholics or retards" because they are the easiest roles to play.
• Christian Bale showed up as Charles Manson doing Jesus and yet, outside of saying "shit" on network TV, dropped some serious truth when he thanked Mark Whalberg for giving a quiet performance (the ones that no one ever recognizes) for him to give a loud one. There's something to be pondered here about the nature of acting and whether or not "award" type of performances are really great acting or not. I guess that explains why Colin Firth took it over Jesse Eisenberg.
• David Fincher looked miserable, just adding to his reputation as being an impossible man to work with. Seeing him win reminded me of one of my favourite Fincher stores as told by Sharon Waxman in Rebels on the Backlot. When one of the Fight Club producers heard Helena Bonham Carter's line to Edward Norton "I want to have your abortion," she begged and begged Fincher to change it. Finally he agreed on the condition that he got to change it to whatever he wanted and it would have to stay. Fine she agreed, nothing could be worse. Until she heard the new line: "Best f**ck I've had since kindergarten," and she begged him to put the other one back. 
• Al Pacino, you've won so many awards, why, all these years into your career, can you not compose a coherent acceptance speech?
• David O. Russell didn't headbutt anybody. Guess it's good George Clooney wasn't on site.
• Good for you Diane Warren, it's a great song even if the movie is suppose to be crap.
• Trent Reznor won a Golden Globe. Both of us have apparently grown a lot since The Downward Spiral.
• Dear Lea Michele: you are not attractive, you cannot act and your voice sounds like a poor man's Vanessa Hudgens. Make of that what you will. 
• Inception didn't win anything. Good. It won't win Oscars either. It doesn't deserve them and it makes me sad to think that movies like True Grit or Rabbit Hole didn't get a nominations so that this one could. 
• Robert De Niro's speech was a better indictment of the HFPA than anything Gervais did and his quip to Matt Damon, "I loved you in The Fighter" was hilarious. Usually de Niro is so stern. Good for him. 
• All that said, Helena Bonham Carter made me think of Hitchcock's Vertigo in which Jimmy Stewart tries to transform a woman into a a former dead love:

Could Hena Bonham Carter actually be Edward Scissorhands in Disguise? You Decide

Easy A

There’s a moment in Easy A where the story’s hero Olive says that she wishes her life had been directed by John Hughes. In the reality of this film, it might as well have been. The gift of Hugh's films was his ability to combine the idealism that we love in the movies with just enough intelligence and humanity to make them feel as though they were talking to, not above or below, us. That’s Easy A’s gift as well, right down to the musical number, and it gets it right for maybe the first time since Juno. There are so few good films about teenage girls that are honest and sincere enough to be genuinely perceptive to their plights while also being funny and warm. Throw Easy A on that pile.

Olive (Emma Stone) is just your average teenage nobody until one day, trying to get out of spending the weekend with her best friend’s strange hippie parents, gets caught up in a lie about having lost her virginity. The little bathroom fib makes it’s way to the ears of the school Christian militant Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and soon the whole school knows about Olive and her faux sexcapdes, making her one of the most talked about girls at school. Finding herself in detention for mouthing off to one of the Christians in class, Olive becomes friends with Brandon (Dan Byrd) who is gay and tormented daily because of it. If she would pretend to have sex with him he could lose his reputation and live happily through the rest of high school. She agrees and soon is in business as guys of all different varieties give her gift cards in exchange for the privilege of telling people they hooked up with her. Their lives are better and her notoriety soars. As luck would have it, Olive is studying the Scarlett Letter in English class, a book in which its hero smears her good name and reputation in order to help those around her. Ah ha, parallels are brewing. Movies sometimes have a heavy handed way of using classroom scenes in order to bring in texts or theories that draw artistic and thematic parallels to the film itself. Some writers mistake this as being symbolic. Easy A however has the good sense, in that self-reflexive post modern way, to acknowledge itself as a modern day retread of the Scarlett Letter and works that into the story as the starting point instead of the whole one. So Olive, in an act of defiance, just like in the Scarlet Letter, embroiders a red A onto the corsets she wears to school. This works wonderfully well for Olive until she soon realizes that while everyone was interested in her for what she could do for their social lives, no one is really interested in anything more than that. Call it a critique on the state of our current superficial society in which sex tapes and tabloid exploits are the gauge from which we measure celebrity as opposed to, oh I don’t know, personality, talent, being a good person, etc. I also call it a lot of fun. Olive’s parents are played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as the kind of movie parents that everyone wants but so few ever really get. They are funny, smart, caring, supportive and understanding. Parents, especially dads, are so often the villains of films that these two are a blast of fresh air. In fact, all of the characters are refreshing. Sure the film sometimes feels like it is going through the motions of the plot (then again no one ever accused John Hughes of being a compass of daring and original work), but they all behave in that funny movie way that we love: they could never be mistaken as anything but movie characters, but they are the kinds whose company we love to be in.

The film is also hip and fresh in that smart and hilarious way that Clueless was in the 90s. But a few weeks ago I just got finished criticising Going the Distance for being too hip for it’s own good. Now here is another comedy that knows about books and movies and music (The Bible is in the best seller section of the local book store, right next to Twilight) but it manages to work them into the story in a way that makes them feel real and authentic. They add to the tone of the story. Sometimes when characters talk about pop culture they are just trying to be funny. Easy A is funny but it also creates the sense that these are smart kids who know how to effectively draw the lines between themselves and pop culture and the film ends with the biggest laugh maybe anyone has ever gotten out of Huck Finn. Mark Twain is out there, grinning somewhere.

Most of the film’s charm must be attributed to its star Emma Stone. Stone has been on the fringes of some good movies (Superbad, Zombieland) but is now on her way to stardom. Sometimes all it takes is for an actor to be in the right role at the right time and that’s what is happening here. Stone is funny and confident and cute and knows how to act in a way, that, although probably not realistic, is still believable in terms of teenage drama. Easy A is also a huge step up for it’s director Will Gluck whose previous credits include the horrible teen comedy Fired Up. Gluck directs this with the flair of a man who knows he needs to prove something. It’s like he’s apologizing for his past sins. Apology accepted.

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