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Sat, Apr. 3rd, 2004 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterHis Girl Friday is awesome ^_^. I want to watch more old movies now. I wish people still made romantic comedies like this, in which there's not much action going on physically, but the dialogue is just wonderful.
Cary Grant's character is a total sleaze, but somehow still lovable, and I really, really love the first dialogue/argument/talk between him and Hildy. And it's not actually that romantic -- it definitely falls more heavily on the comedy side of the scale, but I really do wish that the romantic comedies they have now were remotely like this.
I loved the verbal sparring and how completely Hildy knew Walter (Cary Grant) so she kept trying to spoil his little schemes.
I hate doing the whole "everything in the past was so much better!" route, but from what I've seen of the older romantic comedies, it kind of seems true. I don't know. I think it's because they somehow show that the people falling in love are smart and have some knowledge about themselves, and they're funny because the people who made them understood that no matter how smart a person is, love makes them do incredibly stupid things. It's almost more about the wonderful folly of love than about love itself.
I think that's where a lot of the romantic comedies today (esp. the teenage ones) go wrong -- it's almost as though the people making them assume only stupid people fall in love! Either that, or they don't show falling in love as this crazy, fun thing in which you lose all control. And yes, it cuts both ways, but still. For some, it's as though they go through so much trouble trying to prove that the love in question makes sense and is rational (demonstrating the sharing of the same interests, demonstrating that the guy is as feminist as the girl, etc.) that they forget that most of the time, it doesn't make any sense, and it just happens. I think some current romance novels forget about that too in the interest of trying to show why the two people would fall in love.
Maybe that's a bit of a backlash from all the why would she fall for him? He's an abusive bastard! type things.
Cary Grant's character is a total sleaze, but somehow still lovable, and I really, really love the first dialogue/argument/talk between him and Hildy. And it's not actually that romantic -- it definitely falls more heavily on the comedy side of the scale, but I really do wish that the romantic comedies they have now were remotely like this.
I loved the verbal sparring and how completely Hildy knew Walter (Cary Grant) so she kept trying to spoil his little schemes.
I hate doing the whole "everything in the past was so much better!" route, but from what I've seen of the older romantic comedies, it kind of seems true. I don't know. I think it's because they somehow show that the people falling in love are smart and have some knowledge about themselves, and they're funny because the people who made them understood that no matter how smart a person is, love makes them do incredibly stupid things. It's almost more about the wonderful folly of love than about love itself.
I think that's where a lot of the romantic comedies today (esp. the teenage ones) go wrong -- it's almost as though the people making them assume only stupid people fall in love! Either that, or they don't show falling in love as this crazy, fun thing in which you lose all control. And yes, it cuts both ways, but still. For some, it's as though they go through so much trouble trying to prove that the love in question makes sense and is rational (demonstrating the sharing of the same interests, demonstrating that the guy is as feminist as the girl, etc.) that they forget that most of the time, it doesn't make any sense, and it just happens. I think some current romance novels forget about that too in the interest of trying to show why the two people would fall in love.
Maybe that's a bit of a backlash from all the why would she fall for him? He's an abusive bastard! type things.
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Sat, Apr. 3rd, 2004 11:19 pm (UTC)There are a lot of great movies from the period -- I really like Bringing Up Baby and Holiday, both starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn (Bringing Up Baby is particularly funny). The Lady Eve is fun too, with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. And then of course there's the Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire movies, which I've been rewatching lately -- Swing Time, Shall We Dance, Follow the Fleet, and Top Hat are my personal faves of the ones I've seen.
All this just my opinion, of course! But I had to share because I'm always excited to see someone else expressing affection for old school romantic comedies!
(no subject)
Sun, Apr. 4th, 2004 04:47 pm (UTC)I've been getting more into them the past few years -- Audrey Hepburn movies, then Philadelphia Story, Singin' in the Rain, etc.
And thanks for the recs! I really really really have to dig up the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers ones because of the dancing!