(no subject)
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.
Tags:
(no subject)
Sun, Apr. 4th, 2004 04:25 am (UTC)In relation to explicitness?
Sun, Apr. 4th, 2004 11:16 am (UTC)Re: In relation to explicitness?
Sun, Apr. 4th, 2004 05:21 pm (UTC)This is mostly conjecture because I don't read that many American comics, but maybe the comics code made it easier for writers to have girlfriends-of-the-week for their heroes instead of portraying a single relationship with continuity -- it's hard to avoid the question of sex and kissing after a while.
I do know in Japan, they've got censorship of the drawing of genitals -- so you end up with a sort of code in manga much like the code for homosexuality in Hayes codes movies. They have naked men holding baseball bats and other phallic objects in front of their legs, or sudden cuts to speeding trains and the like during sex scenes, and an entire visual symbology built around the fact that they can't draw genitals. Of course, it also leads to really weird pictures in which you have girls fellating a blank space between a guy's legs as well.