Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Morning Glory

When I first saw the trailers for Morning Glory, I actually assumed I would hate it. But then there was something about the reviews as they came in that intrigued me. Not enough to see it in theatres, but enough that I put it on my streaming queue when it became available on Netflix.

It surprised me, in a very good way. When Rachel McAdams' character Becky finally loses it in a job interview and begs the boss to take a chance on her and believe in her it hit pretty close to home for me.

What was refreshing for me was that the film seemed billed as a romantic comedy, or maybe just a standard "working woman" comedy. It seemed from all the commercials like it was going to follow the very specific line of plot that we've seen a million times before.

I don't think I realized until the end how much it wasn't actually following that course. This isn't a story about a frigid women finding love with the annoying guy she used to hate. It isn't a woman with a successful career discovering that she may have missed out on love just in time to save herself. Those elements are there, but they're all subverted in one way or another.

In the end, it was a film that took typical romantic comedy tropes and instead applied them to a relationship between a boss and her older employee (Harrison Ford's aging news reporter). Not in a romantic way, at all, they don't fall in love. Sure, there's a romantic subplot for Becky with the hunky producer at the more prestigious news magazine show. They go through most of the steps too, but in at a very sub-plot level.

I normally try not to pick apart the lessons that we learn from movies aimed at women. They're usually very boring and not my style. Finding a man to take care of you is more important than following your dreams kind of stuff. But I think looking at the lessons of Morning Glory is actually worthwhile. I am not all surprised to see the film was written by a woman, but I'm very glad to see that the sensibility of the story stayed intact.

State of the Blog

First off, I know I keep promising I'll update this more and not delivering. There's a reason for that this time, which is that I've been busy making my first feature length film. I've been shooting a documentary this year, and it's kept me very busy. But we're getting closer and closer to wrapping that up, so I'm going to try one more time to revitalize this and get it going.

Second, I know if I have any subscribers it's probably because of my Project Runway posts. I WILL be recapping All-Stars, but I am leaving the country to shoot more of my film for two weeks when it premieres. So those first few episodes will probably be delayed until I get back, unless somebody knows how I can watch in Seoul, South Korea.

NOW, what this post is actually about: one way I'm going to get back to blogging is to start writing shorter reviews. I've been reading a lot of reviews lately and I've realized that my favorites are very short and succinct. I love Roger Ebert's column even when I don't agree with him, and it's usually quite short. I've found that movie reviews that are longer bore me to tears and I'm a filmmaker.

So, shorter is better.

This blog was originally intended to be a review blog for movies, television, and books. I've expanded it a bit, because I used to write a weekly column for a newspaper and I enjoyed that. So here are my goals for 2011 on One Girl's Opinion (but starting in February when I'm in the US again):
-An opinion column roughly every other week
-A movie review every week (usually on old releases unless I actually get to a theatre).
-Once a week, a television episode review. Could be a current show or something old I'm rewatching. I may do reviews of an entire series or set of episodes, I'm winging that part.
-A book review once a month.

I'll probably set specific days of the week and dates for these after I see how the first month of this system shakes out.

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