ALINE BROSH MCKENNA AND THE FEMALE ACTION MOVIE

After I binged out on Mexican horror movies for Halloween I needed a break. Not a break from watching movies, that would be the smart thing to do.  I needed to see something nice.  A chick flick.  After a couple of false starts I settled on Morning Glory (2010).  I remembered that it got fairly good reviews when it came out, then promptly vanished forever.  That's just what I needed, something fluffy that would drift away on a breath, that would show a glossy snapshot of a pleasant world.  Morning Glory is about the Clumsy-cute Spunky Girl Who Won't Give Up.  She finds herself thrust into place as director of the worst rated morning talk show on television and she has to get those ratings up or they will cancel the show.  The only way to do it is with a plan that is so crazy it just might work - drag in a surly highly respected journalist and try to force him to banter.  It's a Shirley Temple movie, with Harrison Ford as the old grump who must be won over by cute little Rachel McAdams' cheerful never-say-die attitude.  But of course what it really takes is for her to finally snap and bitch him out for being a hateful old jerk. It was cute.  It washed my brain clean.

When I looked it up I found that it was written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada (2006), which I kind of hated.  One thing I didn't hate about it though was the writing.  As I said, I eventually started to like it.  That's what happened with Morning Glory - I never really hated it but I finally liked it for what it was.  So I figured what the hell let's check out something else by Aline Brosh McKenna and see what happens.

I looked up 27 Dresses (2008) and it seemed like the sort of thing that was the least like anything I would ever want to experience, so I knew I ought to see it.  The way I am different from a lot of people is instead of just learning about things I know I will like I try to learn about things I might not like, but I try to find something good in them.  Some stuff I know about, like zombies.  I saw Lucio Fulci movies in the '70s at drive ins and dollar movies so zombies are OLD OLD hat to me.  You can keep your zombies.  Unless they include Milla Jovovich all strapped up in black leather.  But being a bridesmaid, that is something I don't know about.  I have been to a couple of weddings and what an incredible waste.  Weddings are anathema to me, so the idea of there being a person who is a wedding junkie, or women who dream all their lives about the perfect wedding, that is just INSANE.  The titular dresses are a closet full of bridesmaid dresses, and this whole movie probably got kickstarted by the brief online Horrible Bridesmaid Dresses craze.  The hero of the movie is the person who always does everything for everyone else and never for herself, a wedding junkie with a closet full of horrible dresses, one from each wedding she has been in.  She is played by Katherine Heigl, who seems to be popular for her non-threatening everywoman appeal.  She is hopelessly in love with her handsome boss and when her younger prettier sister comes along and snatches him up something has to snap.  You could send this movie back to 1938 and put Claudette Colbert in it and it would work just the same - changing dresses in the back of a taxicab (driven by Allen Jenkins) as she rushes from one wedding to the next.  It was after seeing this that I understood that these are Female Action Movies.

An action movie has a hero seeking a fabulous object in exotic locations with an inferior sidekick, facing obstacles and adversaries which become progressively more difficult until at last the good guy wins.  Except in these movies it isn't vengeance or a million dollars in gold, it's the fulfillment of a lifelong dream or true love.  There are no explosions except emotional ones, no leaping through windows shooting two machine pistols as a ball of flame explodes behind you, except with your heart.  The sidekicks are not ever-present, sometimes they are quite intermittent but they are there, to act as a sounding board or to give advice - not cute and spunky like the hero but helpful and convenient.  The adversaries are not evil, just unsympathetic, selfish, oblivious to the feelings of others, and they are not defeated, just brought around to the side of righteousness.

Armed with that knowledge I tried out I Don't Know How She Does It (2011), though not without some trepidation.  I almost chickened out.  Sarah Jessica Parker is the urban mother of two who does something important in investment banking that nobody understands which causes her to always be going somewhere and breaking promises to her daughter.  Maybe she just waited to start a family but at some points Parker is looking a little haggard, and maybe too old for these cheerful chatter roles, but what else has she got going for her?  She's going to have to be playing crazy grandmas someday. Through much of the movie I found myself exclaiming "I HATE THIS," and yet the overall effect was that I actually liked it. One very important adventure aspect of the Female Action Movie is public embarrassment.  In each of these movies there are moments of supreme public embarrassment which, contrary to her expectations, the hero survives with few repercussions.  Falling down, hitching up your underwear where everybody can see you, getting lice from your kid.  It happens, it's over, nobody dies - like crossing that jungle rope bridge over the piranha river chased by cannibals, it seems like it is going to be terrible but then it is over and you cut the ropes and keep running.

I had some momentum going so it was either We Bought A Zoo (2011)  or Laws of Attraction (2004).  I don't know about the zoo thing, and kids and animals so I will pass on that one.  Laws of Attraction stars Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan as two high-powered divorce lawyers who instantly hate each other so obviously they must fall into bed as soon as possible and eventually wake up from a drunken spree - married.  This wasn't quite as specialized as a Female Action movie as McKenna's later work and it would be a good married date movie because naturally any divorce movie ultimately affirms marriage.

Finally I tried to finish it off with Three To Tango (1999) but McKenna was merely co-writer on it and frankly it stank so bad I happily quit after 15 minutes of heavy-handed yoks and gay jokes.  So there you go.  That was my foray into Aline Brosh McKenna territory and what I learned from it was that your sidekick will always be there for you when you do something stupid and humiliating. If you just keep trying and never give up you will finally find true love, have your dream wedding, and balance a happy home with a career in high finance.  Sometimes you just have to snap, and smack somebody down, and think about yourself for once, and show them you are a human being too, but it will all work out okay in the end.  That's how it is in the movies anyway.