MY MOVIE SHELF: Working Girl

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 132 Days to go: 92

Movie #308:  Working Girl

Has anyone ever thought about the title of this film? If there had been the Internet and Twitter in 1988, I’m sure there would’ve been a dozen clickbait thinkpieces on it, but I’ve no idea if it had ever really been discussed in the traditional formats of the day. Working girl is a term for a prostitute, as we all know, and while the movie Working Girl is not about a prostitute but about a woman trying to make it in corporate America, it is a clever little play on words about how difficult that actually is. Women (even today, not just way back in 1988) aren’t always taken seriously, are sometimes objectified, and are almost always required to play by men’s rules in order to get ahead. This particular working girl, in fact, (Tess McGill, played to perfection by Melanie Griffith) is quite literally prostituted out by  her boss (Oliver Platt) over to some cokehead in Arbitrage (Kevin Spacey), the assumption being she could maybe sleep her way into a better position. It’s gross, but not really all that surprising, and I find the double meaning of the film’s title to be an intriguing detail, an added layer to the richness and depth of the story.

Working Girl is not just about the struggles of women in the business world, though. It’s also about the Haves versus the Have-Nots. After the unfortunate moment with the cokehead from Arbitrage and his porn limo, Tess gets a job working for Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). It’s her first time working for a woman, so she thinks things will finally be different. Katharine, however, is not of the same ilk as Tess. She comes from money, has been afforded every advantage, and has never really had to work or hustle for anything. She thinks Tess is beneath her, and she takes advantage by trying to pass off Tess’s idea for a business deal as her own. Like everything else, Katharine considers it her due.

Thanks to Katharine being laid up with a broken leg in Europe, though, when Tess finds out about the subterfuge, she goes to work correcting it. She contacts the man Katharine was going to reach out to, Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), and fakes and stumbles her way through this new world, passing herself off as Katharine’s colleague instead of her secretary. It’s crazy, and yet you can’t help rooting for her — because she’s been wronged, because she’s smarter and works harder than almost anyone else around, and because the deck has always been and will always be stacked against her.

There are close calls and shenanigans in all sorts of settings: tropical themed weddings, “lust and tequila,” changing shirts at the office, failing to check the dosage on the Valium, and Tess’s boyfriend Nick (Alec Baldwin) screwing some skinny chick while Tess is supposed to be at class and then still having the cajones to get pissed when she answers “Maybe” to his marriage proposal. It’s a rollercoaster.

Harrison Ford is at maximum charming in this film, shorting circuits for miles in every direction with his serious sexiness overload. Whether he’s making up stories about where he got his chin scar or discarding the idea that Tess might not like him or admitting that he MIGHT have peeked when he got her undressed for bed, he is the most desirable man on the planet or any other planet in this movie. Han Solo IS a scruffy-looking nerf herder next to Jack Trainer. He’s sharp, witty, quick on his feet, and never once patronizing or condescending to Tess the way literally almost every other person she’s met up to that point has been. “The Earth moved. The angels wept. The Polaroids are … are … uh … are in my other coat.” More’s the pity.

This particular tale also benefits tremendously from the presence of Tess’s best friend Cynthia (Joan Cusack), who is loving and supportive but who also doesn’t want to see her friend get hurt by all this social-climbing and who frequently tells it like it is. “Sometimes I sing and dance around the house in my underwear. Doesn’t make me Madonna. Never will.”

Some people might dub Working Girl a Cinderella story, but it’s not. Tess works and strives for every single thing she has. She knows her stuff, she’s aware of the stakes, and she plays their game. And she wins. “You can bend the rules plenty once you get to the top, but not while you’re trying to get there. And if you’re someone like me, you can’t get there without bending the rules.” It’s a gamble, but it pays off in spades. She gets the better of Katharine’s “bony ass,” she gets the guy who is WAY BETTER BY LIKE A MILLION TIMES than the disconcertingly hairy guy she was with before, and she even gets a much better position than she thought when Oren Trask (Philip Bosco) offers her a job at his office. And she never once had to prostitute herself.

It kind of makes you want to sing a soaring Carly Simon song, doesn’t it?

MY MOVIE SHELF: Notting Hill

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 180  Days to go: 182

Movie #197:  Notting Hill

“Tempting, but no.” That’s just one of the many, many great lines from Notting Hill, and it’s most definitely the one I say most often in my everyday life.

That’s the thing about Notting Hill, though. It’s a romantic comedy about an ordinary guy (Hugh Grant as William Thacker) and an international movie star (Julia Roberts as Anna Scott) who happen to meet and fumble through attempting a relationship — with all the difficulties of managing fame and paparazzi and being in the public eye — but still feels totally relatable and authentic.

Hugh Grant is delightfully understated here, not a sexy cad but also not a stuttering, fidgety mess. He’s reserved, witty, self-deprecating, and still sort of hesitant and unsure of how to act around this amazing dream of a woman. Julia Roberts, meanwhile, is understated as well, tentative and on guard at times, daring or defensive in others. Ironically, it might be her most humanizing role ever because it feels like her most vulnerable and the most like maybe she really is. And the two of them together have a sweet, lovely, teasing and easy chemistry that bubbles like fresh champagne in all their scenes together.

It’s actually that bubbling chemistry that makes their rifts so painful and heart-wrenching. The scene when William is confronted with Anna’s wayward American boyfriend (Alec Baldwin) is awkward and uncomfortable, but so is the following set of scenes, as William’s friends try to set him all with all manner of other women in order to forget Anna, full of sorrow. And the engineered tracking shot of William walking through the Notting Hill Market, as seasons change and people’s lives evolve around him, while “Ain’t No Sunshine” plays over the soundtrack, is simply gorgeous. It’s bar none one of my favorite scenes of any film from any time. It so perfectly illustrates that feeling of a broken heart, of having to trudge through life while it still stubbornly happens all around you, and not being able to engage with any of it.

Another strong point of Notting Hill are William’s collection of friends. There’s Tim McInnerny as best friend (and horrid cook) Max, Gina McKee as other best friend and wheelchair-bound attorney Bella, Earl of Grantham Hugh Bonneville as obtuse Bernie, Emma Chambers as William’s baby sister Honey, and the amazing, perfect, incomparable Rhys Ifans as the illustrious flat-mate Spike. Max and Bella are William’s rocks, supportive and loving. Bernie, as hapless as he is, points out how nice it is when someone wants to go out with you. Honey is amazing, and her proclaiming to Anna that she’s always felt they could be best friends, is kind of exactly how I feel about at least a half-dozen celebrities of my own (call me, Kelly Ripa!). And Spike is a disaster and a hero, and since he’s the only one reasoned enough to point out what a “daft prick” William is for turning down Anna’s final offer, when she’s “just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her,” he kind of saves the entire day.

The final scene, where William admits his daft prick-ness to Anna in a room full of reporters, is sweet and perfect, and the following montage, as the movie comes to its close, as the two are wed, stepping out together on the red carpet, and reading peacefully on a bench as Anna strokes her baby bump, is easily one of the best endings to any romantic comedy ever, because it encompasses a true “happily ever after” sensibility. It warms my heart so much, and I simply can’t get enough of it. Honestly, I can’t figure out why more people aren’t crazy in love with this one.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Beetlejuice

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #26: Beetlejuice

It occurred to me today, watching this for perhaps the thirtieth time, that I didn’t really understand this movie when it came out. I was thirteen, so I got the gist, but a lot of the darker references — and a lot of a jokes, to be honest — were lost on me. I thought it was great and hilarious, of course, but I suspect that came from the off-beat nature, the frenetic score and the unrestrained performance by Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse that all combined to make it a movie that seemed great and hilarious, even if you didn’t get all of it. (And I suspect I wasn’t the only one who didn’t quite get it, considering the Beetlejuice cartoon that ran from 1989-1991, featuring characters Beetlejuice and Lydia as friends.)

Over the years, though, my appreciation for the film has deepened significantly. It’s a tight, raucous comedy — a sort of controlled chaos. Even the opening is intentionally discordant. With the camera panning across the peaceful countryside of a small northern town, it could be mistaken for a much different film if not for the score — a frantic, jarring, jumping series of notes that practically made composer Danny Elfman a household name (at least among cinephiles). The score lets you know there is something unsettling about this sleepy scenery, and that feeling is confirmed when the camera stops on a large Victorian farmhouse and a giant, hairy spider — bigger than the windows — crawls over the roof. The perspective and tone shifts again to reveal the house and the town are all part of a scale model built by homeowner Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin, almost disquietingly thin as compared to his current self). He and his wife Barbara (Geena Davis) are taking the world’s first staycation, reveling in the chance to hang wallpaper and avoid friends. They make a quick run into town for supplies from their hardware store (an innocuous dog trotting through the edges of each scenic location change), then crash their car through a covered bridge and into the river below when trying to avoid the (same) dog that crosses their path. Within a few short minutes of the opening shot, the quiet, homebody Maitlands arrive home from their crash into the river to discover they’re dead — at least the third twist against the expected and the movie’s been on for maybe ten minutes.

The movie wastes very little time on exposition or unnecessary scenes, and saves itself from having to by making the nature of death and the dead a mystery the Maitlands don’t understand any better than the audience does. They sort of fumble through their new existence and when the urbanite Deetz family (Jeffrey Jones as the jittery Charles, the never not-perfect Catherine O’Hara as the style-conscious Delia, and teenaged Winona Ryder in her breakout role as proto-goth Lydia) moves into their home, they seek to haunt the interlopers out, with no success. The nefarious Betelgeuse is actually sort of tangential to all this. He tries to insert himself into the Maitlands’ dealings with the Deetzes, and Keaton’s performance just takes over from there. It’s so dynamic, in fact, I think most people forget the movie isn’t really about him at all. Still, his draw is undeniable, and he makes something dark and ultimately quite frightening in concept a comedic tour de force. It’s easily the most iconic role of Keaton’s life, even surpassing Batman.

The two calypso numbers are also iconic and fun, and the netherworld is full of visual gags. The bulk of the movie, in fact, is joke upon joke with barely a breath in between, on top of a rather simply constructed framework. I think that’s what makes it work so well, actually. Dealing with life and death, even comically, a film can get bogged down in its own mythology. Beetlejuice doesn’t, yet it still brings heft to Lydia’s loneliness and depression, to the Maitlands’ affection for her, and to the terror of the séance and final showdown (again, masterfully scored by Elfman at a terrifying, escalating pace). I didn’t get that at thirteen.

Awesomely, this movie has sort of grown up with me, in my own mind, experience and perspective. At sixteen, I could definitely relate to and understand Lydia better than I had at thirteen. I felt her disconnect from her parents and her longing for someone to nurture her. In my early twenties, it was Delia who caught my attention because I wanted to be stylish and expressive and understood artistically, while still believing I had all the answers. A few years ago, I could’ve been like Charles, actively looking for a way to relax and get away from all the stress in my life. And now I’m more like Barbara and Adam, happy to be at home spending time with my family. In that way the movie is universal and timeless. I look forward to experiencing it many more times.