MY MOVIE SHELF: The Heat

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: 55 Days to go: 39

Movie #385:  The Heat

Anyone who says women aren’t funny can go jump in a lake. The Heat takes the typical buddy cop formula — one uptight, one wildcard — and puts two women in the roles, to hilarious results. That’s not just writing doing that work. The stars of The Heat — Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy as Agent Sarah Ashburn and Detective Shannon Mullins — are gifted comedic actresses. And the movie itself was one of the funniest and most successful of the year of its release. Was that a fluke? Was it due to something other than the hysterical performances of Bullock and McCarthy? Of course not.

Bullock and McCarthy both have excellent comic timing, and they’ve got a great talent for physical comedy as well. McCarthy is a perfect wildcard, practically being typecast as one these days in various funny movies. She goes all out, with everything, and she’s never afraid to really commit to a bit. Even better, she uses her body un-self-consciously, and never for cheap fat jokes. On the contrary, Detective Mullins has an active and healthy sex life with numerous partners who can’t seem to get enough of her. She expresses her sexuality “through movement.” And she defends the sexuality of other women too. When she collars a man (Tony Hale) picking up a prostitute, who tries to defend his actions by saying that his wife just had a baby, Mullins says, “I love the sound of a guy, that after his wife gives him his fifth fucking child, complains about her messy vagina.” Even when the creepy albino cop (Dan Bakkedahl) is ripping on Ashburn (because he’s a misogynistic asshole), Mullins stands up for her too. “You’re giving her beauty advice? Do you even own a fucking mirror?” I basically want to be Shannon Mullins when I grow up.

Sandra Bullock, on the other hand, is a pro at acting uncomfortable in her skin, like someone who just can’t relax, who can’t be normal. “You made it weird,” Mullins tells her, over and over. And she does. Agent Ashburn is so desperate to be right and knowledgeable all the time that she unsuccessfully performs a tracheotomy on a stranger in a diner. (“It’s a horror show!”) She’s the perfect dorky goofball, awkward at all times. Even her strings of profanity are strange: “Shit jerk dick fuckers!”

The other shining highlight of The Heat is Mullins’s family. There’s the incomparable Jane Curtin as Mrs. Mullins, who is as funny as she is foul. And Boston hometown guys Joey McIntyre, Bill Burr and Nate Coddry as three of Shannon’s loud-mouth brothers. I’m not kidding, I could listen to wannabe tough guys talk shit in Boston accents all day long. (McIntyre is my personal favorite here, because I used to love him as a young teen when he was in New Kids on the Block. Plus, he’s pretty hilarious here and in The McCarthys on CBS.)

The Heat is just a damn funny movie, plain and simple. It makes me laugh until I cry, until my sides hurt, until I’m choking on my own breath. What more could anybody want?

MY MOVIE SHELF: Charlie’s Angels

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 #48: Charlie’s Angels

Here’s some interesting math. I’ve had a lifelong affinity for Drew Barrymore. Like the weird guy who did the My Date With Drew movie, only I never had any interest in stalking her. I can’t explain it, really, I just think she’s awesome and our birthdays are close together and I’d really like to hang out and be friends with her. Whatever. On the other side of that coin, I really detested Cameron Diaz ever since The Mask. Again, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but she was just so … false, maybe? I found her completely and utterly annoying. BUT! If you take my huge affection for Drew, add Lucy Liu, who I was kind of neutral-positive on (she wasn’t all that well-known at the time, though she’d had small roles in lots of things for several years), multiply it by my love of quippy, flashy movies (to the very concept of a Charlie’s Angels reboot-th power), and add the square root of at least half a dozen clever cameos plus a killer breakout performance by Sam Rockwell, it actually MAKES ME LIKE CAMERON DIAZ. Only in this one movie at first, but after the sequel it was completely cemented. Weird, right?

There’s not even anything to this movie, except quips and flash. The plot is somehow both convoluted and thin, and it apparently exists only to give its three stars the opportunity to vamp it up in crazy costumes. It’s silly and punny and charming and I absolutely love it. I love Matt LeBlanc as a big time action movie star (it’s almost as if Joey Tribbiani finally made it). I love Tim Curry as a pervy billionaire. I love Melissa McCarthy as the overfriendly office worker. I love L.L. Cool J (all the ladies love Cool James, you know) going meta in the opening scene by complaining about cheesy TV shows being made into movies and then turning out to be one of Drew’s costumes. I love Drew’s ex-boyfriend Luke Wilson and current (at the time) boyfriend Tom Green both showing up as romantic interests — Wilson as Pete, for Diaz’s Natalie, and Green as Chad for Barrymore’s Dylan aka Starfish. (Drew really seems like the kind of woman who becomes friends with all, or at least several, of her exes — which seems like a theoretically great way to be, though I could never pull it off with any kind of aplomb.) And I love love love love love Crispin Glover as the creepy thin man who escapes death at least twice in this movie alone (spoiler — he’s in the sequel).

The Angels themselves are also just perfect, as far as I’m concerned. Natalie with her dance sequences, Dylan’s transparent interest in Knox (Rockwell) (she wants to shake, not bake), and Alex constantly flipping her “goddamn hair” in slow motion. In the same way women like to tell you which Sex and the City character they are most like, I compare myself to these particular Angels, and I am all of them. I am a weird combination of flighty and brilliant and I can be very easily amused (Natalie). I’m an offbeat girl with a sometimes harder edge who likes the risk, sexiness and excitement of a bad boy but is always looking for a sense of belonging (Dylan). And I’m a matter-of-fact woman who knows what she wants and makes plans to go out and get it, sans bullshit (Alex).

I really enjoy a lot of this film: the singing yodel-gram girls, Dylan at the speedway in a va-va-va-voom jumpsuit with tons of ’70s porn star blonde hair and cleavage licking a steering wheel, Alex as a dominatrix efficiency expert, Alex as a masseuse with a french-tip  pedicure (the first time I’d ever seen such a thing, and suddenly it was huge), and Natalie in the driver’s ed vehicle with head-gear and Princess Leia buns, among other things. But let’s circle back around to the magnificence that was Sam Rockwell’s performance as his character Eric Knox reveals himself to be the bad guy. Ostentatious, sexy, and magnetic all of a sudden, he’s completely transformed from his previous bumbling aw-shucks guy. He dances, he flirts, he simmers. It’s spectacular. I really wish Sam Rockwell had an entire movie just to do that kind of thing in, but then I’d be afraid of getting another Confessions of a Dangerous Mind or something.

So somehow with a movie that has almost no substance whatsoever, I have found a million and one things to talk about, and could go on for quite some time about the campy fun of it all — I didn’t even touch on Bill Murray’s utter Bill Murray-ness — but instead I will leave you with a final thought: “The Chad is great. The Chad is great. The Chad … is stuck.”