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Classic Movie of the Week OnM - August 10, 2002 ******* All rise. The honorable Judge Pseudolus Maximus presiding. (long pause) You may be seated. Counsel? Call your first witness. May it please the court-- I hearby call the first witness.
*** "(This week's Classic Movie) ... is a featherweight comedy balanced between silliness and charm. It is impossible to dislike, although how much you like it may depend on your affection for ... (the actress who plays the lead role). She is so much the star of the movie that the other actors seem less like co-stars than like partners in an acting workshop, feeding her lines. They percolate, she bubbles." ............ Roger Ebert *** Or, maybe not... perhaps it should be 'witless'...
"The plot follows such an obvious arc, the movie feels half-hearted, a lost opportunity." ............ Steve Murray (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
"Soon degenerates into a too-slick silliness that confuses empowerment with cloying cutesiness." ............ David Noh (Film Journal International)
"A featherweight romp that wants to flaunt stereotypes but instead winds up reaffirming them." ............ Eugene Novikov (Ultimate Movies!)
"Traffics heavily in disgustingly cute stupidity and crude cultural stereotypes." ............ Joe McGovern (Matinee Magazine)
"Handicapped by a lame, predictable storyline that calls attention to itself too often." ............ James Berardinelli (James Berardinelli's ReelViews)
"Criminally stupid...has all the charm of fingernails scraping a blackboard for ninety minutes." ............ Frank Swietek (One Guy's Opinion) *** Or, on the other hand... "How can a movie which sets out to argue against Aristotle's saying that "The law is reason free of passion" be deemed dumb and inconsequential ? As if !" ............ Kevin Laforest (Norm @ The Movies) *** Order... order, please... (much gavel banging) Please continue, counsel. Ah, statistics. You can pretty much prove anything with 'em, so why bother? Ah, illogical misstatements, you can pretty much diss any ol' objectivity with 'em, so why not do so? This month, as you probably already know, has been designated by your humble movie man as the 'Guilty Pleasures / Buried Treasures' portion of the year's cinematic offerings, and since last week I offered up one of my choices for 'buried treasure', this week it'll be 'guilty pleasure' time. This film actually did respectively well at the box office, but it was the subject of mixed critical reviews, some of which are summarized up above. Mixed? I object! I know, you are saying to yourself right now that 'they all look pretty extremely negative to me'. What's with the 'mixed'? Good question, and the answer is simple. The summaries I've picked out are (nearly) all negative because I ignored the ones that were positive or even even-handed when I chose them. In fact, the source for these review excerpts, rottentomatoes.com, gave this film an overall 'fresh' recommendation. The reason I initially chose to do this selective parsing was to back up my contention that my choice of movie for this week really could be considered a 'guilty pleasure', at least if you go by what these reviewers felt after they saw it. Of course, those reviewers were all wrong, and I happen to be right, and not just because Roger Ebert and Kevin Laforest are on my side. (Heck, I never even heard of Mr. Laforest before this last week, but hey, he obviously has good taste, at least this once, right?) I'm right and they're wrong because I understood what the film's creative crew was trying to achieve, and they clearly did not. I approached this lighthearted, well-meaning, shiny happy comedy with the idea that I wanted to be entertained for a few hours without having to overly engage my higher brain functions, and they wanted to turn it into either a political issue or delve deeply into why it didn't succeed in doing what it never intended to do in the first place. Sidebar, Your Honor? Uhh, I realize that I might seem just wee bit self-righteous and arrogant in that last paragraph, but over the last year as I have delved ever more deeply into the world of film and film criticism, and studied the works of other esteemed members of the trade, I have become aware of two important things. First, it is rare to find a film, any film, that is either universally loved, or universally hated. The very best films still may contain flaws, sometimes even glaring ones. The very worst films almost always have at least a redeeming feature or two. The emphasis the reviewer/critic places on good or bad aspects is theoretically based on objective, impartial criteria, but of course that's just as rare as either a totally perfect or totally worthless movie. Success as a film critic hinges less on whether or not your analytical skills are honed to a fine edge as to whether or not you find that most of your readers agree with you most of the time. But there are things more important than 'success' to some critics. If you are a true film fan, you have a passion for the medium itself that transcends the intellectual pleasures of mere analysis. You have the courage to admit that sometimes you just like a movie because it speaks to you, strikes a chord, vibrates in resonance. You recognize that the people who made the film share your passion, and then you tend to become forgiving of their (really very minor) trespasses and get fully into their overall groove. So, second, it is one thing to approach film (or TV, or music, or any art) criticism as if it were 'reason free of passion', and quite another to stand up and say it ain't necessarily so. To do the latter takes at least a modicum of courage and a willingness to accept that reason and passion aren't opposites, but complements. Otherwise, it's just two sides pickin' a fight, each one trying to show off how much they wish they knew. End sidebar. I passionately like this film, and when I entered the theater last year to see it, I was unsure if I had made the right decision, since there was at that point in time only one rational reason propelling me to hand over my $5.50, and that was the fact that it starred Reese Witherspoon in the lead role. The truth is, I happen to think Reese is going to become of the truly shining lights of the acting profession over the next 20-30 years. If Ms. Witherspoon was starring in a film where all she did was boil soup and hand up laundry in her backyard, I'd be there, because she would somehow manage to make those things interesting. Indeed, when I went to read the details on a few of those negative reviews that I had listed above, one statement kept coming to the fore over and over again, word up being that 'Reese Witherspoon singlehandedly saves this movie'. Now here is where I beg to differ. Yes Legally Blonde would not have been the same without Reese. She is so talented, so intelligent, so charming, and so delightful to watch that she does indeed 'carry' the movie. But then, she is playing the lead role. She appears in nearly every single frame of the movie. The movie is about her character, Elle Woods. The primary purpose of the other actors is to provide the means by which Elle discovers that she can be more than she currently is, while still retaining that which makes her unique in all the world. Does it matter if this isn't 'politically correct', or that it is very unlikely to happen in the 'real world'? Do we watch Buffy because it 'could happen in the real world'? Of course not, that isn't the point. Now entering the following into evidence: One copy of the film Legally Blonde on DVD, with accompanying extensive bonus features, including two commentary tracks by Reese Witherspoon, director Robert Luketic and several primary members of the film and production crew. So entered. Your honor, the plaintiff freely admits to being a commentary track trollop, gender issues regarding the word 'trollop' currently being outside of the court's ability to resolve and so not relevant to the case at hand. So noted. Continue. Now, the DVD world and all of its many fans may not realize that the concept of the commentary track, where the director or other persons involved in the creation of a film discuss, analyze or just natter on aimlessly about said film, did not originate with the DVD medium. No, DVD lovers owe a huge debt to the laser videodisc medium that came before for instituting this increasingly popular additional feature of film on video. Commentary tracks on laserdisc began as the result of a fortunate accident that occurred early in the 1980's, after the Philips company, who invented the laser videodisc, realized that the medium was simply too far ahead of its time to be successful in mass numbers. Philips looked to sell off the video technology to someone with more patience, and then chose to mutate it into an audio medium that stored digital audio on a much smaller disc and market that instead. Thus, laser videodisc begat the digital compact audio disc, or CD, and after linking up with Sony of Japan in a marketing partnership, badgered the rest of the world into adopting the Philips/Sony format as the industry standard. It took CD's over ten years to become well established as the predominate audio medium, but meanwhile, the Pioneer company of Japan had been slowly building up sales on the original laserdisc format that Philips had developed and subsequently licensed to them. One of the first changes made to improve the performance of the laserdisc medium was to equip it with digital audio soundtracks in the same basic format of the CD. (The video portion remained analog; digital video encoding was way too much of a bandwidth hog to sustain with the technology of the day). In order to keep compatibility with those early adopters who actually went out and bought these fairly costly machines, the original analog soundtracks were retained, so there were now three audio tracks on the newer discs-- two for stereo analog and one for the digital audio bitstream. This was the 'lucky accident' that later made commentary tracks possible. By the late 1980's and early 1990's, two significant changes had evolved in the entertainment electronics marketplace. The first was that VHS videotape was now the 'universal medium' for movies on video. Videotapes were absolutely everywhere, you could buy 'em, rent 'em, whathaveyou. The second was that improvements in large-screen video display technology and multichannel ('surround') sound reproduction systems were creating the concept of high quality 'home theater'. The people who bought these first-generation 'serious' home theater systems quickly discovered an unpleasant fact, which was that looking at VHS videotape images on screens larger than about 25-27 inches lead them to the inescapable conclusion that VHS picture quality sucked big time. In addition, the copy-protection signals being increasingly added to commercially released VHS films was causing further degradation to the already low-quality picture on many TV sets. There must be a solution to this! lamented the newly technologically updated/downcast citizenry. Uhh, excuse us? said little ol' Pioneer and some friends, sitting over in the corner. We have this neat laserdisc thingy here. Over twice the video resolution of your tape, digital soundtracks, doesn't wear out with repeated playings, a disc library of over three thousand discs and growing, why don't you try it and see? And they did, and there was much rejoicing among dedicated movie lovers, who discovered that not only was everything stated about the medium true, but in addition the higher video resolution allowed for presenting the film in its original widescreen aspect ratio, just like it appeared in real movie theaters. No more putting up with the visual hacking and slicing of 'pan'n'scan' edits for VHS tape editions. Also, there was no degradation of the image from copy protection systems, because laser never had them. The legal arms of the movie studios didn't bother to pursue it because the discs sold (and almost never were rented) to such a tiny percentage of the overall market that they didn't think it was worthwhile, and also, it wasn't the 21st Century yet, where you legislate something whether you need to or not, just on principle. Then, the 'accident' of long ago suddenly paid off, as some bright soul somewhere realized that almost no one was using the old, legacy analog soundtracks anymore-- all players since the middle 1980's could read the digital track, so there really wasn't any need to keep duplicating the audio on the analog tracks. Why not use them for something else that could be more useful? How about having interested filmmakers do a running commentary on the film, and put that on the analog soundtracks? And so it was done, and the laser moviephile audience went bonkers with delight. Inside info from the artists themselves, how cool is this? Counsel? That's all very interesting, but where are you going with it? Is there a point? Yes, indeed Your Honor. The point is that unlike film critics and reviewers, what you hear on a commentary track is the thoughts and opinions of the people who made the film. Now call me a cynic, because I am, but still... why lie on a commentary track? The listener has already bought or rented the film. You don't need to hype him or her into taking it home, like the marketing people need to do. Unlike a critic or reviewer, you, the creator of the work, certainly must know what you had in mind when you made the thing. And if you really didn't like your work, why comment on it at all? It isn't mandatory, in fact it's cheaper for the studio if you don't do the track. So, returning to the film at hand, one Legally Blonde. If the jury should hear the two commentary tracks on this DVD disc, they would be very likely to come to the conclusion that the people who made this film enjoyed their work and thought the end 'product' was a very good one. Ms. Witherspoon and director Luketic, for example, obviously do not consider Elle or her friends and acquaintances to be 'crude cultural stereotypes' or that the writers 'confuse empowerment with cloying cutesiness'. Since they are in a position to know, it is my position that those reviewers of the film who projected such impressions upon it are clearly mistaken. Your Honor! I object! When is he going to review the film, instead of the reviewers? Counsel? Just setting up the background, Your Honor. I would also like to cite the case of Whedon vs. The Season 6 'Grave' Robbers, the latter party of which maintained that there was intellectual chaos afoot during the production of the sixth year of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that the writers in particular had gotten 'sloppy' or 'careless' because Mr. Whedon had not thought his seasonal premise through sufficiently. In this example, Mr. Whedon gave convincing testimony that, and I paraphrase, "If there were fans who didn't like where the show took them last season, that is understandable and perfectly all right. There were some very dark places that we wanted to explore with our characters, and not every viewer will want to go there with them. But what I object to are those who accuse us of slacking off, of planning poorly, of not discussing things in detail, of not thinking things through. None of that is remotely true. We may make mistakes, we're human, but we work damn hard to make this show the very best we can. No one is 'getting lazy'." Your Honor, I object! This is a courtroom! Counsel can't paraphrase! Counsel? I may have to sustain that one. Don't you have the exact transcription available? Sorry, Your Honor, but my hard drive ate my file, and besides, you're completely fictional, as is the opposing counsel. Hey! Whaddaya mean, fiction... (~poof~) So, now for a little bit about Legally Blonde, if you haven't seen it. If you already have, and generally liked it, you might pick up the DVD and enjoy it (and the thoughts of the creative team) all over again. As the film opens, the apparent overall tone is set in the first few minutes, as we see a series of shots of the college campus and the interior of the 'Delta Nu' sorority where the title character, Elle Woods, lives with her 'sisters'. Everything is intensely bright and colorful, far more so than any 'real world' could possibly be. Elle has just finished four extremely successful years at college, where she majored in fashion, was president of her sorority, and even managed to appear in a Ricky Martin music video. As the happy, upbeat soundtrack tune plays out behind the credits, it is openly suggested that this is, for Elle, 'a perfect day'. Elle is nearing graduation with an excellent grade-point average and the expectation of a marriage proposal from her preppie boyfriend, one Warner Huntington III (played by Matthew Davis). What she gets, instead, is serious heartbreak as Warner, who is headed for Harvard Law School, thinks that it would be a strike against his future political plans to be associated with a 'bubbleheaded California girl'. Warner never uses exactly those words, but it is clearly what he thinks. He likes Elle (actually, everyone likes Elle, which she points out to him through the tears, and it's true), they've had good times together, but he reasons (?) that if he wants to be a U.S. Senator before age 30, he needs the 'proper' kind of wife, and she's not the one. This is where the film begins its gradual subversion of our expectations, and rises above the norm. You know darn well that Elle will somehow triumph over this slander before the film reaches its conclusion, and you will be right. What you will expect to see happen is that a comedy of errors will unfold where despite her intellectual limitations, Elle will manage to beat out other, far more clever and 'real' people, and win Warner back, or at least realize she can do better. What happens instead is that Elle is not only much smarter than we give her credit for, she is much smarter than she gives herself credit for. After several days of pining for her lost love and eating quite a bit of chocolate, she decides that she'll prove to Warner that she can be a lawyer too, and makes plans to follow him to Harvard. This apparently preposterous idea works because Elle is, above all things, a person who is willing to adapt, change and move on, and not live in the past, endlessly regretting what 'might have been'. She begins researching what is required for admission to law school, and after presenting a highly unusual (and hilarious) admission essay to the school and doing extremely well on her LSAT, she is accepted and packs up to move to the much less 'colorful' East Coast and the far more 'muted' people who walk the streets and inhabit the older architecture there. This doesn't stop her from trying to bring quite a bit of the West Coast with her, including the pet Chihuahua who is always dressed in matching outfits or otherwise appropriately for the occasion. Elle's attempt to continue to be herself doesn't go down well with the Harvard students and professors, who are baffled at her appearance and demeanor. The cinematography has also changed tone radically after the move to the East, and all the colors are now toned down and earthy. Elle stands out like a sunflower in a wheat field, and becomes the butt of rude comments and practical jokes. Seeking solace and a small reminder of home, Elle drives downtown and stops at a beauty parlor to get her nails done, where she meets a woman who immediately befriends her, and vice versa. This meeting begins a subplot that leads to Elle getting her first sense that becoming a lawyer might be more than a way to win back her boyfriend. Elle's statement that 'everybody likes me', as I mentioned earlier, isn't just an idle boast. Over time, both the professors and the other students begin to understand that behind the fashionable exterior is a warm, caring, and very clever and resourceful person. Elle wins over her detractors, even the snooty new girlfriend that Warner has taken up with, and manages to solve some legal cases with observations and techniques that very few others might have picked up upon or attempted. Is this supposed to imply that Elle will solve all of her future problems with her innate fashion sense and knowledge of makeup and hair care? No, of course not, and I find it hard to accept this as a criticism of the film, although some have tried to make it one. Elle's story isn't about her 'blondness', it's about the preconceptions of others as to what that means, or what they think it means. Joss may have loaded his favorite blond with heaps of on-going angst and metaphor, but Luketic and Witherspoon aren't trying that hard here, and they don't need to. It isn't likely there will be a sequel to this movie, and if there ever was a TV show made based upon its concept, I wouldn't hold up much hope of it being continually clever or original. But then, expectations can be surprisingly exceeded, and that always makes for great delight. Whatever happens, take the smaller pleasures in life when they are offered to you, and Legally Blond most assuredly makes that a case for doing just that. This movie may be a 'guilty pleasure' to some, but I think it's far closer to the 'buried treasure' that for this month, anyway, I hope to make the current fashion.
E. Pluribus Cinema, Unum, OnM
******* Technically darn well blonde enough: Legally Blonde is available on DVD, which was also the format for the review copy. The film was released in 2001 and running time is 1 hour and 36 minutes. The original theatrical aspect ratio is 2.35:1 and this format is preserved on the DVD edition. As mentioned in the body of the review, this disc has a goodly bunch of bonus material supplied with it, nearly all of which is very enjoyable. The 'trivia' video overlay option in particular was both interesting and funny, sometimes simultaneously. The two different commentary tracks were both informative and well presented. People interested in the philosophy of hairstyles should find endless hours of debate emerging from the information and images on this disc. Writing credits go to Amanda Brown for the novel, and Karen McCullah Lutz & Kirsten Smith for the screenplay. The film was produced by Marc E. Platt, Ric Kidney, Christian McLaughlin and David Nicksay. Cinematography was by Anthony B. Richmond with film editing by Anita Brandt-Burgoyne and Garth Craven. Production Design was by Melissa Stewart, with art direction by Daniel Bradford, set decoration by Katherine Lucas and costume design by Sophie Carbonell. Original music was by Rolfe Kent and Diane Warren. The perky pop tune that opens and closes the film, 'Perfect Day', was by Hoku, who apparently is Don Ho's daughter. (The things ya learn doing research, gee!) The original theatrical sound mix was DTS and/or SDDS. The soundtrack mix on the DVD is Dolby Digital. Cast overview:
Reese Witherspoon .... Elle Woods ******* Miscellaneous: Delta Nu, Delta Nu... isn't 'delta' the mathematical symbol used to represent 'change' or 'change in'? So is Elle changing into something new? Or is that just the nature of fashion? Some additional info on the very talented Ms. Witherspoon:
Birth name: Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon Current filmography:
Sweet Home Alabama (2002) .... Melanie Carmichael Looking for a really bad film? I just found out that Master of Disguise may turn out to be the lowest rated film ever on rottentomatoes.com's database of movie reviews. Out of over 60 reviews to date, all are negative except one, yielding it a microscopic 1% rating on The Tomatometer. Check it out here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/TheMasterofDisguise-1114820/reviews.php?page=0&critic=approved&sortby=default ******* The Question of the Week: Do you think that during the first season Buffy was on the air, that Sarah Michelle Gellar 'carried' the show, and that the other characters-- Giles, Willow and Xander-- basically acted to 'serve her needs' as the lead character of the story? By Season 2, I would say that the secondary characters were far more fleshed out and gradually came into their own with the passage of time, but in Season 1 this might be debatable. If you think so (i.e., that Sarah 'carried' the show), was this necessary, or an oversight? (Before you answer, remember that early on, Joss was fairly sure that the show wouldn't be renewed for a second season). Blonde or not, post 'em if ya got 'em, and see ya next week, when your humble movie man will take a temporary back seat to a couple of ATPo 'guest host' film reviewers and some of their own most excellent GP/BT recommendations. Good stuff, coming your way! Take care!
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