{"id":1255,"date":"2009-07-28T09:49:04","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T09:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/wordpress\/?p=1255"},"modified":"2011-10-29T20:08:33","modified_gmt":"2011-10-30T01:08:33","slug":"dadreaction_the-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/archives\/2009\/07\/dadreaction_the-4.html","title":{"rendered":"DadReaction: The Proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Alternate title:  <strong>Movie Moan<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Spectacularly funny beginning.  In a way, they did to The Devil Wears Prada what His Girl Friday did to the Front page&#8211;switched the gender of the assistant\/reporter.  Bullock v. good here, kid adequate.  But if you can imagine Streep and Hathaway becoming lovers in Prada&#8211;go ahead, try it.  No really, are you trying?  Okay, now you&#8217;ve got some idea of what goes spectacularly wrong with this flick.  <strong>The romance is EMBARASSINGLY UNBELIEVABLE<\/strong>.  Wow.  CANNOT express how unbelievable.  Also, the dad is simply from some other, horrible movie about a father who drives his son to suicide.  Just warps the comedy. (It&#8217;s like the public humiliation of the girl in Much Ado About Nothing&#8211;you never get back to the lightness.)<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s truly disappointing about all this is that Bullock and what&#8217;s his name&#8211;the Boy&#8211;have pretty good comic timing: verbal and physical.  They step on each other&#8217;s words and look awkward when they&#8217;re pretending to be cuddly very well.  Also, so much of the humor is good, like the beginning set-up.  But then, just as it goes for simple romance, it goes for simple laughs.  Compare the super set-up of the dog\/eagle joke with the non-set-up of the<br \/>\nnude collision joke.  <strong>(When&#8217;s the last time you took a shower without knowing where the towel was?  First grade?)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m really sick of movies that take hyper-competent women, send them to somewhere with&#8211;I don&#8217;t know&#8211;TREES, and assume they will become completely helpless.  I mean, they won&#8217;t even be able to carry a suitcase.  PLUS: she&#8217;s supposed to be Canadian.  Just who in Canada can be surprised at living conditions in Alaska?<\/p>\n<p>You keep thinking of different ways the romance could have gone&#8211;including nowhere, with some other development of these two:  what&#8217;s wrong with mutual respect?  Is romance the ONLY way we grow?  Why not have the kid have an older brother that she falls for?  Or&#8211;geez&#8211;why not have her take on the dad?  She eats guys like him for breakfast in her job&#8211;she can&#8217;t manage it in Sitka?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alternate title: Movie Moan. Spectacularly funny beginning. In a way, they did to The Devil Wears Prada what His Girl Friday did to the Front page&#8211;switched the gender of the assistant\/reporter. Bullock v. good here, kid adequate. But if you &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/archives\/2009\/07\/dadreaction_the-4.html\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dadreaction","category-flicks"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2310,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255\/revisions\/2310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}