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: The Blind Side

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: 83 Days to go: 57

Movie #357:  The Blind Side

It’s not a secret, I don’t think, that the racial dynamics in The Blind Side are a little bit problematic. It’s a story about a white family adopting a poor black kid from the projects and it’s told, primarily, from the perspective of the white people in his life helping poor Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) out of the ghetto and into a life of privilege and opportunity. And, absolutely, the real Michael Oher and the real Tuohy family had a relationship far deeper and more meaningful than that — he truly became a member of their family in spirit as well as by law, wholly loved as a son and as a brother — but the movie can’t convey that. Not really. It’s flatter and more two-dimensional, and it can only do so much. It deals with race in the best way it can, maybe, but it still doesn’t address it from Michael’s perspective. Aside from a free verse poem he wrote and threw away (which his white science teacher reads to his white other teachers), we don’t really experience Michael’s views on the racial dynamics at play, and if he feels the effect of them — which he most certainly would have, in some way. We don’t get Michael’s perspective on much of anything, really. According to the film, Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), Michael’s adopted mother, had to teach him the fundamentals of football because Michael couldn’t even grasp that much. It undermines Michael as a person, is my point. It’s not a perfect film.

I don’t really want to talk about that, though. What I want to talk about is how this role — this particular role — won Sandra Bullock her Best Actress Oscar.

Since she first knocked us all out wearing an Arizona Wildcats shirt and driving a bus in Speed, Sandra Bullock has been labeled “the girl next door” and “down to earth” probably a billion times. She’s grounded. She’s relatable. Even in something goofy and comedic like Miss Congeniality, Bullock plays the woman who doesn’t bother with putting on airs or even makeup because she’s comfortable in her skin and in being who she is. Leigh Anne Tuohy is not your typical Sandra Bullock character.

Maybe it’s the hair, or maybe it’s the accent, or maybe it’s the designer clothes or the meticulously put together look, but Leigh Anne Tuohy is not the girl next door. Nor is she down to earth. Not the movie Leigh Anne. (I have no basis of judgment for the real one.) This is a woman of extreme privilege and wealth. She is a woman used to buying what she wants whenever she wants it, a woman who takes charge and is used to getting her way. She can’t even conceive of a teenage boy having never had a bed of his own before. So when Michael Oher comes into Leigh Anne Tuohy’s life in the film, it rocks her to the core, and Bullock portrays that. She’s physically shaken. You see it in her facial expressions and the catch in her breath, in the slight change of her posture. And then she shifts again and shakes it off because in her world you don’t show weakness and you don’t wallow in problems, you address them and you move on. Bullock embodies every inch of that role in a way she just never has before — because she’s never had a role like this before.

It’s a thin little film, a sports movie, a feel-good flick, a light confection meant to be enjoyed and set aside. It’s not the type of movie that wins awards. But Sandra Bullock made it something bigger than that, solely through her performance. Yes, her winning an Oscar also has to do with her reputation in the industry and how well-liked she is and the narrative that it was “her time” as opposed to the time of any of her challengers in the category (two young newcomers yet to “pay their dues” or whatever, two seasoned and oft-rewarded veterans), and just the general dearth of really substantial roles for women in any given year that get seen and marketed enough to be contenders with the Academy. There are all sorts of reasons people win Oscars, and they range from the political to the financial to the popularity contest and beyond. But don’t think that means they don’t depend on the performance. Bullock’s performance was award-worthy. And it was also feel-good.

Sometimes, films can be both.

 

MY MOVIE SHELF: A Time to Kill

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: 154  Days to go: 109

Movie #284:  A Time to Kill

There are a lot of things I like about A Time to Kill — things I liked when it came out, and things I like still. The affinity levels may have changed a little bit over the years, one way or another, as I’ve grown and changed as a person, but not drastically. It’s a good film, and I get a lot out of it. One aspect of it that has always made me a little uncomfortable, though, is the closing argument defense attorney Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) gives at the end of the film.

Jake’s client Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L. Jackson) is on trial for killing the two men who brutally raped and almost murdered his ten-year-old daughter. The entire trial, Jake has been trying to get details of the rape on the record, and his closing statement is a perfect opportunity to do that unencumbered and uninterrupted. It’s also his opportunity to, as Carl Lee has made clear, say the thing to the jury that will help them relate to this crime. Jake, like the jury, is “one of the bad guys,” as far as Carl Lee’s concerned, and that’s why he picked him. He sees black people and white people on different sides of a wall — “However you see me, you see me as different.” — and he enlisted the enemy to make the rest of the enemies see it his way. It’s a cold outlook, whether you believe it has merit or not, and although Jake is taken aback by this admission (He’s always looking for someone to be on his team in this film, yet he finds himself repeatedly alone.), he uses his closing to giving a detailed and emotional accounting of the brutality Carl Lee’s daughter endured, while the jury, with their eyes closed, are meant to imagine it and picture this girl. “Now imagine she’s white,” he says, and suddenly everything clicks. Even the judge and District Attorney Buckley (Kevin Spacey) and Carl Lee himself know what an impact that statement makes. But does it? Or should it?

Essentially, what that statement boils down to — and what the entire movie is getting at, really — is that we’re all people, and yet we rarely see each other as such. I find that incredibly depressing, even more so because as much as I hate to admit it, it’s probably true. If there’s one thing being on Facebook makes clear, it’s that a lot of people have no capacity to look at life through the eyes of another person. The things we post, the things we share, the things we argue about and debate at length, all lead me to believe that more often than not we’re all so clouded by the lens of our own experience, we have a hard time accepting that other people, other races, other cultures, other income levels experience things differently than we do. I’m guilty of it myself. There have been many times I’ve struggled to understand how anyone could see something differently than I’ve seen it, or how anyone could hold onto anger over an issue that wasn’t that big a deal, or could prioritize something I found inessential. And yet it happens, all the time. How did compassion and commiseration become such specialized skills? How do we fix that? Certainly not by an impassioned monologue that promises if we can only see a black rape victim as a white rape victim, all will be well in the world. It feels simplistic and kind of insulting to me, and yet I appreciate the idealism of the thought.

I’ve never felt the way Carl Lee does here, that there’s a my side and a his side, but it’s entirely possible, too, that I live in a state of blissful ignorance on the matter. Being a woman, I know full well many of the prejudices women face as I’ve experienced them first hand. As a white woman, however, I don’t have that same connection to the prejudices African-Americans face, even though I know they exist. The best I can do, therefore, is to take their accounts at face value and work to correct them, work to dispel them. And that comes from following their lead on how they feel and what they want to accomplish, just as Jake eventually follows Carl Lee’s lead on how to approach this trial. So maybe it’s not perfect and maybe it’s a little too pat and a little too idealistic, but maybe it’s the best we can do, metaphorically: Strive to be better. I can get behind that, absolutely. Does it make the ending more palatable? I still haven’t decided.

There’s a lot more to this movie than that, though. There’s Kiefer Sutherland leading the KKK, and his father Donald as a broken old drunk of a lawyer. There’s Oliver Platt as the morally compromised Harry Rex, and Ashley Judd as Jake’s ever-sweaty wife Carla (I swear, they rubbed her in baby oil before every take). There’s the awesome Charles S. Dutton as the tough Sheriff Walls and Chris Cooper as the (accidentally) one-legged deputy. And then there’s Sandra Bullock as law student and sexy assistant Ellen Roark. When I was younger, I was really irritated that Jake and Ellen didn’t take advantage of that insane sexual chemistry they had. As I’ve gotten older, I really appreciate the restraint given their relationship. It’s super easy for two sexy actors to have sexy sex in a movie; infidelity is like a go-to plot twist in films of every genre. But for two characters to be attracted to each other and to want to have sex but to not because it would be wrong? That is a rarity, and I find it all the more commendable for that reason.

Of course, this being a John Grisham story, I once again can’t really speak to the plausibility of the legal things that occur. It seems to me a lawyer can’t throw an elbow to a guy’s face even if that guy tried to blow up his house. And if I was the one guy on the jury ready to vote not-guilty when the foreman took an informal poll at the restaurant, I’d probably go to the judge about him using the n-word, which at the very least should get that guy kicked off and might lead to a complete mistrial. And of course, don’t shoot anyone for raping your daughter. I cannot guarantee you’ll get the same outcome as Carl Lee Hailey.

I actually volunteered as a rape crisis advocate several years ago, which amounted to me going to emergency rooms whenever a rape victim came in while I was on call. I would hold their hands and sit with them and listen to them and just be there for them when all the other people (cops, social workers, hospital staff, etc.) had specific jobs to do and couldn’t just be support. I was called in once for two fifteen-year-old girls, one of which asked me to phone her father because she was too embarrassed and humiliated to. I called him up and told him what happened and had to talk him down from killing the boys who did this. I understand the impulse, but trust me: Your daughter will need her father with her, not in jail. If a girl’s dad ends up imprisoned for murdering her rapist, it’ll just be one more thing for her to blame herself for. I know the justice system isn’t perfect, and a lot of times these d-bags go free, but vigilantism is not the answer. Sorry, Carl Lee.

“There ain’t nothin’ more dangerous in this world than a fool with a cause.”