romcoms

Materialists (2025)

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I’ve been seeing a lot of critical re-evaluation of Celine Song’s Past Lives in recent days, particularly as those who “saw through” its “mediocrity” from the beginning are feeling vindicated by the lukewarm reception of follow up feature Materialists. I couldn’t agree less about the quality of Past Lives, a movie I rated five stars and which was my third favorite film of 2023. On the other hand, that this movie is getting mixed to middling reviews isn’t a huge surprise to me, either. All the declarations that “the old-school romcom is back, baby!” that surrounded this film’s release may have been more of a threat than a promise. There’s also a tendency toward more drama than comedy, and there are moments where the slow burn that made Past Lives so powerful plays out here as more drawn out and tedious, but never so much that you’re ever truly bored. 

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker living in NYC for an organization called Adore. As the film opens, she is celebrating her ninth match that has resulted in a marriage, and she’ll be attending the wedding solo. At the wedding, she runs into her ex-boyfriend, aspiring actor John (Chris Evans), with whom she interacts warmly and fondly; she also meets brother of the groom Harry (Pedro Pascal), a handsome, wealthy socialite. Although she encourages Harry to join Adore as a client, citing that he’s a perfect package for their clientele and the proverbial “unicorn,” he seems most interested in pursuing her. In a flashback, we see that she and John broke up after an argument that was the result of his meager financial situation and both her frustration with his barely making ends meet and her own self-hatred over her materialistic nature. Meanwhile, in spite of her overall success in her field, Lucy is having trouble finding a good match for her client Sophie (Zoë Winters), a lawyer in her 30s, and when she thinks she’s finally made a good match, something tragic happens that shakes her faith in herself and her foundations. 

Materialists is about two things: the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, and what gets lost when love is treated like capital – a measurable, tradable commodity. Early on, Lucy compares her work to that of a mortician or an insurance claims agent, in that she treats matchmaking as a mechanical enterprise. Boxes checked in Subject A’s columns match boxes checked in Subject B’s column, and we’ve got love. She gives the hard sell on Adore to several of the women at her client’s wedding, talking about love as an ineffable and beautiful thing, that matchmaking isn’t about finding someone to be with for the next ten years but a “nursing home partner” and a “grave buddy.” It’s hard to tell where the real Lucy is in all of this, how much of what we see is her putting on a show, but when we see her in a moment of vulnerability with her boss, Violet (Marin Ireland), she admits that she’s not interested in dating because she wants her next partner to be her husband, and that her ultimate goal at present is to marry a man who is wealthy enough to provide for her. At other times when it’s clear that the facade is slipping, she tells John that he shouldn’t want to be with her because she believes that, at her core, she’s a cold, unfeeling person who is only concerned with marrying rich. She wishes that she could be the kind of woman whose love for John would have kept them together despite his inability to take her to fancy restaurants instead of the corner Halal stand, but she isn’t, at least not until the story that she’s told herself about who she is professionally crumbles. When Sophie is assaulted by the man that Lucy matched her with, Lucy is confronted with the unfortunate truth that this is something that happens in their business because many terrible people are able to charm their way past attempts to gatekeep them. Lucy realizes that her narrative of being the girlboss of twenty-first century luxury courtship is both (a) not true, and (b) perhaps not that important, and that love is more than a series of compatibility tests. 

What’s fascinating about the way that people talk about love is how transactional it all is. When the bride from the beginning of the film has cold feet, Lucy is ushered in to see her; the woman asks why she’s even getting married in the first place, since her family doesn’t need a cow or to seal a political pact through ritual like previous generations. Lucy leads her to the truth, that the bride’s sister’s jealousy over how the groom was more handsome and taller than her own husband made the pride feel valuable, and that gets her up on her feet and down the aisle. We get a montage of several of Lucy’s clients, both men and women, and these segments lean a little bit more into the comedy than the mostly dramatic film. Although Sophie is the first one that Lucy interacts with on screen (over a phone call) and it makes her come across as shallow and unpleasable, but she pales in comparison to some of the people we meet later. There’s one client who clearly doesn’t know or doesn’t care how his requests come across, as he opens by talking about wanting to meet a woman who shares similar interests, who’s seen all the old classics and probably likes the same kind of music, but he also insists that his potential matches be in their twenties (he is forty-eight); when pressed, he says that even twenty-seven is “basically thirties.” Lucy has to put on a pleasant face with all of them, and it’s clear that she finds many of these people to be creepy and weird, but she also lives inside of their world insofar as she also treats love like, as she herself puts it, math, and the film is about her realization that there are some things that can’t be reduced to numbers and checklists. 

This one doesn’t have the same heart as Past Lives did, and I don’t think that it’s trying to. That film was much more introspective and thoughtful, and this one isn’t trying to recreate that tone so much as explore a different one. It’s also a more standard and formulaic one, but at least it’s been a while since there was such an earnest send-up of the canonical romantic comedy. It’s subversive in that there’s never a moment when the love triangle seems like it could ever possibly resolve with anything other than John and Lucy giving things another chance. Harry’s successful wining and dining of Lucy requires that we buy that our leading lady’s character arc will be accepting that she’s exactly as shallow and materialistic as she perceives (the persona she has created of) herself to be and she’ll be picking the rich guy? Be real. Within this paradigm of two love interests, one rich and one poor, for there to be a narrative at all requires that she not end up with the guy in whom she initially expresses a shallow interest. Where this breaks from the mould of the standard plot structure is that most of these films would have both love interests vying for Lucy at the same time, but the film is fairly well bifurcated right in the middle where she moves from one to the other, with the rejected partner disappearing from the plot after Lucy’s life is upended. 

A lot of whether this film will work for you depends on how you feel about Dakota Johnson and her acting style. Prior to her matchmaking career Lucy was, like John, attempting to make it as an actress, but she got a regular (well, sort of) job instead while he continued to pursue his artistic passions. This means that there is a conversation in which Lucy says things like “I decided acting wasn’t for me,” and “I was never a very good actor,” and I just know that the moment this movie hits video on demand, people are going to run wild with screenshots of these moments and attempt to use them to dunk on Dakota. In this house, we call those haters, and there’s not a hate campaign in this world strong enough to make me turn on my Madame Web. Before she was a director, Song was a playwright (and a matchmaker), and it’s in the scenes in which Lucy interacts with clients that the film feels the most like a stage play, with strong repartee, and it’s in these scenes that Johnson is the most believable. She’s as charming here to me as she was in Am I OK?, but while this film is much more well-made and richly photographed, it doesn’t connect with me on an emotional level. 

When I sat in the darkness staring up at Past Lives two years ago, it resonated with me deeply. Like Hae Sung, I had recently socially encountered an old … well, an old something let’s say, and the spark that still lingered there was such a powerful reminder of what that kind of interaction could feel like that I broke things off with someone I had been seeing casually for a couple of months because that electricity and chemistry wasn’t there. Circumstances with my old flame meant that, like Hae Sung and Nora, it could never be, no matter how much in-yun there may have been between us. There was a potency to the reality of it all that left an indelible imprint on me, and which simply is not a presence in Materialists. It may not be fair to judge this movie based on that criterion, especially since Materialists isn’t trying to be as deep as its author’s previous work, but it is nonetheless an area that it’s lacking. And before you jump to the conclusion that I may have overrated Past Lives as a result of my empathic rapport with its characters, you should know that I actually cried more during Materialists than I did Past Lives. The movie wasn’t connecting with me on the same emotional level as Hae Sung did, but the treatment of love as capital and the way that the film utilized that to find places in me that are still smarting from more recent misadventures and tribulations in the bottomless open sea that is contemporary love and dating … it did get to me. It didn’t get to me by resonance; it just happened to make me recall some misfires of late and then give me too much time to dwell on those before the film moved on to the next scene. When I watch Past Lives again, I will cry again. This one? Not so much. 

This is a cute movie. Serviceable, occasionally goofy, and mostly charming, I’m glad that it exists, even if I’m not sure it will have staying power. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bonus Features: Baby Cakes (1989)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1989’s Baby Cakes, is a made-for-TV romcom starring Ricki Lake as the world’s most adorable stalker.  It follows the exact narrative beats of the original 1985 German film it adapts, Sugarbaby, but it handles them with a much lighter, gentler touch.  In Sugarbaby, our lonely mortician protagonist has no friends or hobbies outside her obsessive scheming to sleep with the married man who catches her lustful eye.  It’s a much darker film than Baby Cakes tonally, but it’s also much more colorful, as it’s lit with enough candy-color gels to halfway convince you that it was directed by Dario Argento under a German pseudonym.  Baby Cakes sands off all the stranger, off-putting details of the original to instead deliver a familiar, cutesy romcom about a woman struggling with self-image issues as the world constantly taunts her for being overweight; Ricki Lake’s bubbly personality lifts the general mood of that story, as does the decision to make her object of desire an engaged man instead of a married one.  Even her stalking is played as an adorable quirk in 80s-romcom montage, as she tries on different disguises while tracking down her supposed soulmate.

One essential romcom element of Baby Cakes is the quirky circumstances of its star-couple’s professions.  Ricki Lake not only plays a mortician in this case; she’s the morgue’s designated beautician, livening up dead bodies with cheery glam makeup.  The hunk she stalks in the NYC subway system is not traveling to a boring desk job in some office cubicle somewhere; he’s the subway train conductor who drives her to work everyday, a much less common occupation.  Naturally, then, the NYC subway setting where she first lays eyes on him becomes a defining component of the film, affording it some novelty as a Public Transit Romcom instead of just a generic one.  It’s in the subways where she forces a meet-cute, where she flirts by buying him Sugar Babies at a vending machine, where she dresses like a mustachioed janitor to sneak a peek at his work schedule, etc.  That setting had me thinking a lot about public-transit romances as a result, so here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

While You Were Sleeping (1995)

The most adorable public-transit romcom I could find also involves some unethical scheming and lusting from afar by its female star, in this case Sandra Bullock instead of Ricki Lake.  Like in The Net, Bullock stars as an unloved schlub with no social life outside her relationship with her cat.  Her only romantic prospect is making cartoon-wolf eyes at a handsome businessman stranger (Peter Gallagher), whom she watches board the train for his morning commute with ritualistic devotion.  You see, her quirky romcom occupation is working the token booth for the Chicago L-Train system, which the movie specifies early in an opening credits sequence that features hotdog stands, Wrigley Field, and a Michael Jordan statue to establish locality.  It also ends on an image of Bullock riding the L-Train herself as a passenger instead of a booth worker, modeling a classic white wedding dress and a “JUST MARRIED” sign as if she had hired a limousine in the suburbs.

While You Were Sleeping doesn’t spend too much time on that train platform, though.  In an early scene, her mysterious would-be beau is mugged and falls unconscious onto the tracks, when she suddenly springs to action for the first time in her go-nowhere life and pulls his limp body to safety.  Much of the rest of the film is spent in hospital rooms and the newly comatose man’s family home as she hides her non-relationship with him by pretending to be his fiancée.  It’s a convoluted sitcom set-up that would lead to one doozy of a “Grandma, how did you meet Grandpa?” conversation by the time she makes a genuine romantic connection, but in terms of romcom logic it’s all relatively reasonable & adorable.  Notably, she is eventually proposed to through the plexiglass barrier of the train-platform tollbooth, with an engagement ring passed along as if it were token fare.  Cute!

On the Line (2002)

If you wish While You Were Sleeping had more emphasis on the novelty of its Chicago L-Train setting and are willing to give up little things like the movie being good or watchable, On the Line is the perfect public-transit romcom alternative.  In fact, that is the only case in which it is recommendable.  *NSYNC backup singers Lance Bass & Joey Fatone play boneheaded bros in the worst college-campus cover band you’ve ever heard.  While Fatone refuses to grow up after college (continuing to live out his rockstar fantasy by playing dive bars and wearing t-shirts that helpfully say “ROCK” on them), Bass gets a boring desk job at an ad agency, which means a lot of morning commutes on the L.  It’s on one of those trips to work when he strikes up a genuine connection with a fellow rider, chickens out when it’s time to ask for her number, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to complete the missed connection.  When they inevitably find each other a second time, it’s on the same train platform, where they once again flirtatiously bond by reciting Al Green song titles and the lineage of American presidents.  I am not kidding.

Do not ask me what happens between those two fateful meetings on the L, because I am not sure there is an answer.  In lieu of minor details like plot, themes, or jokes, On the Line is a collection of occurrences that pass time between train stops.  Besides a heroic third-act nut shot in which one of Bass’s idiot friends catches a baseball with his crotch at the aforementioned Wrigley Field, most of the “humor” of the film consists of characters reacting to non-events with softly sarcastic retorts like “Okayyyy,” “Well excuuuuuse me,” and “Ooooohhh that’s gotta hurt.”  Otherwise, it’s all just background noise meant to promote a tie-in CD soundtrack that features acts like Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Vitamin C and, of course, *NSYNC (the rest of whom show up for a “hilarious” post-credits gag where they play flamboyantly gay hairdressers, to the movie’s shame).  Other on-screen corporate sponsorships include Reebok, Total Request Live, McDonalds, Chyna, and Al Green, the poor bastard.  And because Bass works at an ad agency, the movie even dares to include a conversation with his boss (Dave Foley, embarrassing himself alongside coworker Jerry Stiller) that cynically attempts to define the term “tween females” as a marketing demographic.  The main product being marketed to those tween females was, of course, Lance Bass himself, who comes across here as a not especially talented singer who’s terrified of women.  Hopefully they vicariously learned to love public transit in the process too, which I suppose is also advertised among all those corporate brands.  If nothing else, the romance is directly tied to the wonders of the L-Train by the time a character declares “Love might not make the world go round, but it’s what makes the ride worthwhile” to a car full of semi-annoyed passengers. 

Paterson (2016)

If you’re looking for a movie that’s both good and heavily public transit-themed, I’d recommend stepping slightly outside the romcom genre to take a ride with Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s zen slice-of-life drama starring Adam Driver.  Paterson may not technically be a romcom, but it is both romantic & comedic.  Driver leans into his surname by driving a city bus around his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, earning just enough of a decent living to pay for his eccentric wife’s art supplies.  His character’s first name also happens to be Paterson, which is one of many amusing coincidences that become quietly surreal as they recur: seeing twins around town, hearing repeated lines of dialogue, and striking up conversations with strangers who happen to be practicing poets.  You see, Paterson is not only a bus driver, no more than Sandra Bullock’s lovelorn protagonist was only a tollbooth worker or Lance Bass was only a mediocre singer.  He’s also an amateur poet who spends his alone time between bus rides writing work he never intends to publish, poems that are only read by his adoring wife.  It’s all very aimless & low-stakes, but it’s also very lovely.

I generally find Jarmusch’s “I may be a millionaire but I’m still an aimless slacker at heart” schtick to be super irritating. However, as a former poetry major who rides the bus to work every day and whose biggest ambition in life is to write on the clock, I can’t be too too annoyed in this case.  If nothing else, Paterson gets the act of writing poetry correct in a way that few movies do.  It’s all about revising the same few lines over & over again until they’re exactly correct; it’s also all about the language of imagery.  Paterson gets the humble appeal of riding the city bus right too, even if it is a little idealistic about how pleasant & clean the bus itself and the conversations eavesdropped on it tend to be (speaking as a person of NORTA experience). While You Were Sleeping & Baby Cakes have the most adorable use of their public-transit settings on this list; On the Line has the most absurd.  For its part, Paterson just has the most.  There are a lot of quiet, contemplative bus rides as the movie peacefully rolls along, which is the exact kind of energy I try to bring to my morning commute every day.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Baby Cakes (1989)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Brandon & Boomer watch Baby Cakes (1989).

Britnee: Have you ever believed that you imagined a movie? For years, I had faded images in my mind of a young Ricki Lake eating a bag of Sugar Babies. I had separate memories of a grocery store wedding that felt like something I visualized from a retelling of a family event. I even wrote those images down in various notebooks in my preteen bedroom, just so I wouldn’t forget. When I finally got frequent access to the internet, I plugged in these descriptions on Ask Jeeves, and viola, the answer to these burning mysteries was the 1989 made-for-TV movie Baby Cakes. More recently, I found out it’s a remake of a 1985 German film called Sugarbaby, which I have yet to see but am very interested in watching. Perhaps it’s the reason behind Ricki Lake’s candy of choice?

Grace (Lake) is an overweight mortician living in Queens. When she’s not working, she’s spending time with her incredibly pessimistic friend, Keri, or indulging in snacks while watching horror movies alone in her apartment. She’s very relatable. Her mother has passed, and her father marries a woman who is cold towards Grace, and the couple make frequent disparaging comments about her weight. While Grace and Keri are hanging out at an ice-skating rink, Grace spots “the most beautiful man she’s ever seen” skating his butt off on the ice. He ends up being a subway train conductor, and Grace, who takes the subway every day, starts to stalk him. It’s more like the type of stalking teens do to their crushes than Baby Reindeer stalking, so it’s more cute than creepy.

It turns out that Grace’s crush, Rob (Craig Sheffer), is in an unhappy relationship, and she shoots her shot. He politely brushes her off at first, but he has a couple of drinks and shows up to her apartment for a romantic dinner gone bad. Their relationship starts off with a pity date where she brings him to her parents’ home to show him off (along with her own sassy makeover), ultimately to prove to them that she can have a boyfriend who loves her for who she is. But after she and Rob start to spend time together, their relationship blossoms into genuine romance.

Baby Cakes is a feel-good romcom with a John Waters touch. What I admire about this film is that that it avoids the overweight main actress cliche by not having a segment where Grace tries to lose weight to win over a man. If anything, she leans into her love for food to seduce him. Brandon, other than Grace’s non-changing relationship with food, what are some other unique touches to the film that caught your attention?

Brandon: Like all romcoms, Baby Cakes is entirely defined by its unique touches.  We know exactly what’s going to happen to our couple-to-be as soon as Grace forces a meet-cute through some light, adorable stalking, so the joys of the film are entirely to be found in the quirks of its details.  That manufactured meet-cute being staged at a Sugar Babies vending machine was a memorable enough quirk to linger in Britnee’s mind for decades, as was the grocery-store wedding, which is so oddly adorable that it’s incredible the idea hasn’t been stolen by a film with a bigger budget.  As with all romcoms, our leads both have quirky professions (corpse beautician & subway train conductor) and quirky hobbies (stalking & figure skating) unlikely to be shared by the audience.  Then there’s the quirky prop of the awkward family portrait Grace had commissioned of her younger, thinner self and her younger, happier father, which the movie mines for genuine pathos while never losing sight of the fact that it looks ridiculous.  Baby Cakes is all quirks all the time, as required by its choice of genre.

Personally, my favorite quirks were the dour personality ticks of Grace’s sidekick, Keri, who absolutely kills her job as the movie’s wet blanket.  Mostly, I was just excited to see actor Nada Despotovich in an extended, feature-length role, since her biggest impact on the cinematic artform was a single scene as Chrissy in Moonstruck.  It was like getting to hang out with my favorite cryptid for 90 minutes after years of only catching blurry glimpses of her in roles like “Receptionist” (The Boyfriend School), “Bartender” (Castle Rock), and “Mom” (Challengers).  Despotovich’s pouting over Nic Cage’s romantic indifference (and her pouty refusal to “get the big knife”) in Moonstruck is Hall of Fame-level romcom quirk, so it’s delightful to watch her pout at length in Baby Cakes as a hypochondriac doomsayer who hates everyone & everything except her equally tragic bestie.  There’s some genuine friendship drama shared between the women, too, as Keri predictably becomes frustrated when Grace finds confidence & happiness, since it ruins their miserabilist dynamic.

The audience knows to cheer on Grace’s newfound confidence, though, even if Keri has a point that she’s setting herself up for heartbreak by falling for a man who’s already engaged.  The victory of Baby Cakes is more than Grace achieving self-actualization without losing weight; it’s that she consciously stops trying to lose weight and instead learns to love her body as it is.  That confidence radiates off of her, making her more attractive to people who usually look right past her.  One of the best sequences is a montage of Grace’s neighbors complimenting her “punk” makeover as she runs her daily errands, modeling Desperately Seeking Susan-era Madonna outfits and flipping around a ponytail.  The inward search for that confidence being sparked by outside validation from a man who’s initially embarrassed to be seen with her in public is a complicated, queasy issue, but that’s exactly what drags this story out of romcom quirks and into the realm of real-life human behavior.  I understand why the early, cutesy stalking sequence invites Baby Reindeer jokes from the overly cynical Letterboxd commentariat, but the modern work this most reminded me of was the Aidy Bryant sitcom Shrill, which still felt progressive for touching on these same body positivity issues decades later (if not only because there are so few other representations in mainstream media that take the inner lives of women seriously if they’re not exceptionally thin).

To me, Grace’s short-lived stint as Rob’s stalker didn’t feel entirely out of line with typical romcom behavior.  Her outlandish personal-boundary violations while luring him to her apartment are just as integral to romcoms’ entertainment value as the outlandish personality quirks of the film’s various side characters, to the point where they’d be parodied by Julia Roberts’s “pond scum” protagonist in My Best Friend’s Wedding less than a decade later.   The question of a romcom’s success mostly relies on whether an audience can look past the unethical behavior & eccentric personalities and still feel genuine emotion when the couple-to-be finally, inevitably gets together.  By that metric, Boomer, was the drama of Baby Cakes successful for you?  Did you feel anything for Grace & Rob beyond amusement?

Boomer: I found this dynamic pretty effective, honestly. I don’t know how widespread knowledge about this issue is in the mainstream, but the gay community is a pretty image-focused, fatphobic, and body-fascistic group – especially the most visible community members, who are usually white, cis men. There are historical reasons for this. In the 70s, the biggest sex symbols of the era were slender rock stars with lean bodies and who were playful with gender norms: your Jaggers, your Mercurys, your Bowies, etc. When the AIDS Crisis hit its peak, those things that had defined sexiness in the previous decade were stigmatized by society at large, as the public associated that leanness with illness and queerness with disease. This gave rise, in part, to the action star of the 80s: a he-man with huge biceps. There was large-scale adoption of your Stallones and your Schwarzeneggers as the new blueprint of sexiness affected both straight and queer communities, as gay men all over attempted to emphasize their health through bodybuilding (and steroid use, which—as a needle drug—made the situation worse). Things have swung back the other way in the years since (famously, 2018 was crowned by one writer as the dawning of the age of the twink), and back again at an even faster rate. Widespread use of social media platforms that keep its audience engaged by feeling bad about themselves, the rise of self-marketing on said social media as one of the few (extremely unlikely) bids for class mobility, the propaganda about health and virility that always accompany fascist trends, and pandemic-era social isolation combining into a horrible Voltron of body dysmorphia unlike anything history has ever seen. 

I spent a long time at war with my body because of the culture I came of age in, and there’s an existential loneliness that I recognize in Grace from certain points in my life (not that I’m any less single now, but I’m managing). Life can be miserable when there’s something about your physical appearance that you can’t change, that you exhaust yourself trying to change (Grace mentions a half dozen diets that produced no results), and when people not only can’t see past that, but also see your inability to change it as a moral failure of willpower. For Grace, this is further compounded by her father’s negligent absenteeism in her life, and he and her stepmother both pile on her about how her life would improve if she just lost some weight. I felt for Grace, and so her desire to go outside the bounds of acceptable social behavior was understandable, albeit only condonable in a fictional, heightened romcom world. Grand romantic plans of this nature rarely work out in the real world, but it’s fun to watch it play out in a fairy tale fantasy where the girl with the wicked(ish) stepmother finds love with the prince when she wins his heart while breaking him free of a loveless engagement. And then they kiss in a subway!

About twenty years later, this same kind of thing would be tackled again, but less deftly. TV movies of the 90s and the turn of the century were more focused on “in” eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, and were either fictionalized “ripped from the headlines” scripts or biopics like Dying to be Thin (1996). Starting around 2005, however, there were a lot more films focused on what it was like to be stigmatized as a fat person. To Be Fat Like Me, a 2007 Lifetime original starring Kaley Cuoco who puts on a fat suit to prove to her heavier family members that their experiences of bullying are overstated, only to realize that, nope, people do treat her differently (none of this is made up). A year later, the crown jewel (to some, and crown turd to others), Queen Sized, about an overweight teen girl who becomes her suburban high school’s homecoming queen, also premiered on Lifetime; this one is worth mentioning since the main character was played by Nikki Blonsky, who portrayed Tracy Turnblad (a role originated by Ricki Lake) just a year prior in the 2007 Hairspray. Although films like these are aiming at the same “accept yourself” theme as Baby Cakes, they don’t feel as authentic. They feel manufactured to fulfill a quota or try to cheat some kind of grant out of a “stop bullying” campaign rather than an honest story about a girl whose looks don’t match the current zeitgeist but who is empowered to take the reins of her life by a few passionate weeks with a troubled (but not too troubled) stud. She stands up for herself to her family, she leaves behind her abusive boss and takes the first steps into finding work in the land of the living, and she gets the guy in the end. The big speeches in the Aughts TV movies about this kind of thing are too serious and self-important, while the offbeat surreality of Baby Cakes means that Grace’s monologues can be sweet without being saccharine, sincere but injected with bits of humor that make her feel more like a fully realized person and less like a sock puppet for a workshopped-to-death speech in a basic cable melodrama. 

Since we’ve mentioned most of the supporting characters who contributed to the overall atmosphere of the film, I think it would be a missed opportunity not to bring up Grace’s boss at the funeral parlor, who was both hilariously awful and awfully hilarious. He’s clearly a terrible employer, as he attempts to tell Grace she can’t take four weeks off (for her long-term plan to stalk Rob day and night, but he doesn’t know this) because she was late for a cumulative thirteen minutes that month. This tips into funny when he goes on that he needs her – not only because of Keri’s terrible workmanship (we later learn that she tried to fluff up a corpse’s chest with tissue paper, so he’s not incorrect on this point), but also because it’s the holidays, which means it’s their busy season. Later on, he can’t help but play salesman in the middle of a funeral, giving a eulogy in which he mentions the deceased’s desire to one day own a white Cadillac, and that he was “driving one today!”, smacking the casket by his side and declaring it the best that money can buy like he was peddling a 1988 Taurus. Truly wonderful stuff. 

Lagniappe

Britnee: Currently, Ricki Lake is getting a lot of media attention for her recent weight loss. If you Google her, you’ll be bombarded with articles about her losing 35 pounds. I’m glad that she’s thriving, but I hate that this latest Ricki Lake revival is focused, yet again, on her body. How long until the general public rediscovers Baby Cakes? Will they reboot a second time to modernize it? My anxiety about this sacred film being tainted with a terrible remake is very real. I just know they’re going to put the new Grace on Ozempic and, God forbid, bring in Ricki Lake for a cameo where she slaps the Sugar Babies out of Grace’s hands.

Brandon: I, of course, had to watch the original 1985 German film Sugarbaby for completion’s sake, and it turns out this made-for-American-TV remake is a shockingly faithful adaptation.  A lot of the exact scenes and plot details of Baby Cakes are copied directly from its source text, and everything it adds to flesh out the story is pure romcom quirk: the figure-skating hobby, the goofy painting, the supermarket wedding, the hypochondriac bestie, etc.  Sugarbaby is a much sparser, sadder movie as a result, but it’s also incredibly stylish.  Every scene is overloaded with enough color-gel crosslighting to make you wonder if it was directed by Dario Argento under a pseudonym, and it’s much more comfortable hanging out in silence with its downer protagonist instead of constantly voicing her internal anxieties in dialogue.  It also doesn’t go out of its way to leave the audience feeling clean & upbeat.  In Sugarbaby, the subway conductor is married, not engaged, and his affair with the mortician doesn’t necessarily leave either lover in better shape, making for a much more emotionally & morally complicated narrative. It’s almost objectively true that Sugarbaby is smarter, cooler, and prettier than Baby Cakes by every cinematic metric, and yet because it doesn’t have the bubbly star power of a Hairspray-era Ricki Lake (or that incredible elevator-music theme song) it ends up feeling like the inferior film anyway. 

Boomer: Sometimes, looking back over the width and breadth of topics that we’ve covered, in print and audio, in brief and perhaps too extensively, I’m fascinated to see how much we’ve grown at Swampflix over a decade, but I also love how each of us has a handful of movies that “feel” like they were made for just one amongst us. I was five minutes into this one and I thought, “This is such a Britnee movie,” and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible. Weirdly, another example I thought of as a definitive Britnee movie was Mrs. Winterbourne, so I was surprised when I went back to that one to realize that it was actually nominated by a different contributor. This one shares that only-in-the-80s romcom energy where our lead finds love through fraud, stalking, and seduction with The Boyfriend School, though, which was a Britnee selection. Salud, colleague; you are a woman of distinct and delightful taste. 

Next month: Brandon presents The Swimmer (1968)

-The Swampflix Crew

The Sweetest Thing (2002)

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The Sweetest Thing is a major-studio comedy starring Cameron Diaz as a lovelorn socialite who’s become disenchanted with the nightclub hookup scene.  Having matured to the point where she’s ready to seek Mr. Right instead of Mr. Right Now, she drops everything going on in her busy life to crash a wedding in the suburbs where she knows she’ll run into Thomas Jane, the kind of cute guy whom she would normally bed & ghost instead of genuinely getting to know.  She’s joined on this impulsive road trip by her high-powered businesswoman bestie, Christina Applegate, who gently pushes Diaz out of her comfort zone as she gives being romantically vulnerable a shot for the first time in her life.  Meanwhile, they both support their good mutual friend, Selma Blair, as she recovers from a recent traumatic breakup by letting loose with a few low-stakes, short-term flings for comic relief.  It’s a story of three self-determined women supporting each other through the final years of their twenties in the cutthroat world of San Francisco dating.  Heck, they might even find true love along the way.

That plot description fits the version of The Sweetest Thing sold in its contemporary trailers & advertising: a cookie-cutter romcom the whole girl squad can enjoy.  It’s also technically accurate to the events of the story told in the film itself, and yet it is still a lie.  Many gaggles of gal pals were deceived by it in the dark days of 2002, when they lined up for a wholesome Girls Night Out and were instead taken on a road trip through the dankest pits of Hell.  The Sweetest Thing imagines an alternate reality where Romy & Michele are evil, high-functioning, and lethally overdosed on episodes of Sex and the City.  Diaz & Applegate play deeply awful people – the most selfish, morally repugnant women to ever disgrace a martini bar.  Blair plays a dead-eyed hedonist who continually stumbles into Rube Goldbergian sexual scenarios that expose her private bedroom indulgences to the wider San Francisco public, including nearby priests & schoolchildren.  By the time her luckier-in-love besties tease her by playing keep-away with her cum-stained laundry on a city sidewalk, it’s clear what kind of romcom this truly is: a demonic one.  Funny too.

While The Sweetest Thing may look like a classic Hollywood romcom from a safe distance, up close it’s clearly rooted in the tragically chintzy days of the post-9/11 2000s. It does not shy away from potential association with the most prominent “Women get horny too” media of its era, Sex and the City; it even opens with man-on-the-street interviews about Diaz’s heartbreaker behavior with her previous sexual partners, a device heavily relied on in early seasons of that landmark HBO sitcom.  There’s a lingering Farrelly Brothers stench to its over-the-top raunch, however, which includes gags involving exploding urinals, maggoty backseat leftovers, and an ocular glory hole injury everyone sees coming except the woman who suffers it.  Even just the casting of Cameron Diaz alone feels like a nod to that Something About Mary tradition of mainstream raunch, which brought a hetero brand of John Waters gross-out humor to the corporate multiplex.  The “Unrated” DVD version of the film also includes an impromptu electroclash flash mob, wherein our three hedonistic heroines lead an entire restaurant of strangers in an extended dance number about the joys of giant cocks.  What a trashy time to be alive.

Cruel Intentions director Roger Kumble brings little of note to the table here besides his working relationship with Selma Blair, apparently having gotten at least two all-timer comedic performances out of her to date.  If you want an auteurist read on The Sweetest Thing, you have to look to screenwriter Nancy Pimental instead, whose credits mostly consist of TV episodes for bad-taste comedies like Shameless, The Mick and, most importantly in this context, early seasons of South Park.  Critics, audiences, studio execs, and advertisers all seemed baffled by what Pimental was up to in her big-screen debut, but she was clear-eyed in her mission.  She wanted to make a girly version of the kinds of gross-out, reprehensible comedies that boys got to make all the time, dressed up in the surface aesthetic markers of the safer, sanitized material that’s more routinely marketed to women.  The biggest tip-off of her self-awareness is in the requisite dress-up montage before the climactic wedding-crash, in which Diaz & Applegate try on costumes from popular Hollywood comedies of previous decades.  When they dress up as characters from Pretty Woman, Grease, and Desperately Seeking Susan, they’re giving studio executives exactly what Pimental was contracted to deliver.  When they dress up in the pastel tuxedos from Dumb & Dumber, Pimental is signaling something entirely different to the audience.  She wanted to make something chaotic, evil and, above all else, dumb.  She succeeded greatly, and it’s a shame she hasn’t been given this much room to play around with genre expectations since.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #215: Look Who’s Talking (1989) & Deciphering Heckerling

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Welcome to Episode #214 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss the arc of Amy Heckerling’s art & career as a Hollywood auteur, starting with her biggest commercial hit: the talking-baby comedy Look Who’s Talking (1989).

00:00 Welcome

02:28 Der Fan (1982)
05:36 Miller’s Girl (2024)
09:35 Blue Collar (1978)
11:20 Adam Resurrected (2008)
21:28 The Sweetest Thing (2002)

26:46 Look Who’s Talking (1989)
57:50 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
1:12:09 Clueless (1995)
1:20:47 I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Podcast #209: Moonstruck (1987) & Valley Girl (1983)

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Welcome to Episode #209 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee & Brandon return to Nic Cage’s heartthrob era by discussing two classic 1980s romcoms: Moonstruck & Valley Girl.

00:00 Welcome

04:48 A Handful of Dust (1988)
08:16 Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
10:15 Immaculate (2024)
15:00 The Telephone Book (1971)

19:32 Moonstruck (1987)
40:22 Valley Girl (1983)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Podcast #188: Trouble in Paradise (1932) & The Lubitsch Touch

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Welcome to Episode #188 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee discuss the glamorously adulterous romcoms of Old Hollywood legend Ernst Lubitsch, starting with Trouble in Paradise (1932)

00:00 Welcome

03:03 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
05:48 Sorcerer (1977)
07:50 Reality (2023)
12:45 Savage Grace (2007)
16:55 You Hurt My Feelings (2023)
23:03 Rimini (2023)
28:08 Sanctuary (2023)

30:51 Ernst Lubitsch
39:35 Trouble in Paradise (1932)
55:55 Design for Living (1933)
1:13:43 The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
1:28:10 That Lady in Ermine (1948)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

I’m Your Man (2021)

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I’m not convinced that Dan Stevens ever fully achieved the movie star dream career he abruptly left Downton Abbey to pursue.  Between his career-defining run on that glorified soap opera and the Disney Prince paycheck he cashed after the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake, he’s probably financially set for life.  I get the sense that he’s still not creatively fulfilled, though.  After a strong start in the weirdo action thrillers The Guest and Legion, he’s mostly been doing anonymous, supporting work that doesn’t draw much attention to his movie-star potential as a leading man.  The German sci-fi romcom I’m Your Man is a welcome corrective step in that treadmill career trajectory.  In the film, Stevens stars as a perfectly calibrated robot boyfriend, a role that emphasizes both his generic handsomeness and his eerie, inhuman coldness.  Instead of running away from his default perception as a dime-a-dozen Ken Doll hunk (the exact reason Stevens fled from Downton Abbey as soon as he could), I’m Your Man leans hard into that quality, pressing both on its charms and its limitations.  It’s a perfect encapsulation of what makes him unique as a screen presence, which is something he doesn’t always get to showcase.

In I’m Your Man, robo-Dan Stevens is beta-tested by a recently divorced research scientist (Maren Eggert), who is reluctant to treat him like a potential A.I. life partner instead of a household appliance.  She reluctantly agrees to the study in a bargain that will land her own academic research future funding opportunities but finds the implication that a robot boyfriend would fulfill an emotional need in her life insulting.  Initially annoyed by his machinelike perfection and his servantile attention to her every need, she gradually learns to love the walking, talking dildo despite herself.  Their dynamic feels like a broadcast from a slightly brighter world where heartfelt romcoms get to tackle heady subjects usually reserved for eerie sci-fi chillers like Ex Machina.  It’s a very familiar Turing Test story structure that’s not usually played with such a lightness in its doomed human-robot romance.  It balances its romcom cuteness with just enough melancholy & heartbreak to feel sophisticated, but not enough to match the dramatic despair of much drearier sci-fi romances like Her and Never Let Me Go.  Like robo-Dan Stevens, it’s perfectly calibrated for what it is, with all the charms & limitations implied.

If there’s some larger topical or philosophical statement I’m Your Man is trying to make about humanity’s evolving relationship with technology, I’m not able to fully pinpoint it.  It romanticizes the shortcomings & imperfections that distinguish humans from machinery (most starkly in a slow-motion montage of “Epic Fail” YouTube clips).  At the same time, it’s also honest about how comforting & safe it feels to interact with machines instead of our fellow fuck-ups (maybe as subtle commentary on the distinctly modern isolation of smartphone addiction).  I don’t know that it makes any grand, definitive statements about human nature or technological comforts, though.  It instead gently pokes at the boundaries between the natural & the artificial, finding odd moments of peace & romance in their overlap.  For me, the movie’s clearest purpose is in highlighting the eerie charms of Dan Stevens as a screen presence, finding his exact sweet spot as a potential leading man.  Otherwise, it’s just an above-average romcom with a fun sci-fi spin.

-Brandon Ledet

Tourism & Cinema on the Island of Ios

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The Grecian island Ios is such a tourist-dependent community that it has its own commercial website advertising its wares as a party destination, as if it were a hotel resort instead of a genuine lived-in society with its own populace & culture. The ad copy for the site boasts, “Ios Greece is the number-one party island in the Mediterranean Sea,” which is something you can clearly see reflected in our current Movie of the Month – the horned-up Italian romcom Ginger & Cinnamon. In that film, an aunt & niece duo seek love & sex on Ios at the height of the island’s tourism season, which is overrun with college-age bimbos of all genders in a Spring Break-style bacchanal. One of the more interesting formal experiments in the film is the way it frequently interrupts its fictional story of lost love & lost virginity with real-life interviews with Ios island tourists, who’re blissfully drunk on the non-stop party atmosphere (not to mention all the booze). It makes sense, then, that on the website’s Movies from Ios page, Ginger & Cinnamon is listed as the most prominent cinematic representation of the island. It’s the one that shows the island for the gorgeous, boozy tourist trap that it truly is. What’s puzzling is how that depiction fits in with the other two examples the site lists as representations of Ios cinema, which complicate the Party Island escapist fantasy Ios relies on to survive financially.

The inclusion of Luc Besson’s three-hour free-diving drama Le Grand Bleu on the Movies from Ios page really only emphasizes how few films are produced there, making out Ginger & Cinnamon to be something of a local anomaly. According to the copy, “Only some of the underwater scenes were filmed on Ios. Magnari Beach to be precise,” indicating that there isn’t much of a substantial local connection to Besson’s Cinema du Look epic. The third film listed, however, has just as much connection to Ios as Ginger & Cinnamon, particularly in how it engages with the local tourism industry. The 1963 Greek romcom Aliki My Love was meant to be an international breakout vehicle for its titular star, Aliki Vougiouklaki – then known as the National Star of Greece. The film ultimately didn’t make much of an impression on the international market, to the point where it’s currently only accessible in the US via fuzzed-out bootlegs of VHS recordings from Greek television, hosted on sites like YouTube (I suspect with its more scandalous scenes of a scantily-clad Vougiouklaki removed). However, the Movies from Ios page explains, “This is a magnificent movie for anyone interested in seeing what Ios looked like 50 years ago. It is filled with beautiful footage of this wonderful island in the Aegean Sea that we all love so much. Especially the scene that takes place outside the future location of Disco 69 is interesting to see for anyone spending their nights at that location these days. It has not changed much, only the tree by the wall has grown a lot, otherwise the spot is just as it is today.” The funny thing about this description is that the Ios of Aliki My Love is not at all the Ios of Ginger & Cinnamon; a lot has changed, and the plot of Aliki is explicitly about the urgency of preventing that transformation from happening.

Aliki My Love is a fairly harmless, minor comedy that straddles the border between a Grecian remake of Gidget and a European nudie cutie. The soundtrack is more internationally popular than the film itself, presumably because it features a mostly nude Vougiouklak barely covering her breasts in a classic pinup pose on the cover. She operates as a Nudie Pixie Dream Girl in this way through the film, chipperly pestering & seducing an American everyman who has recently inherited ownership of her island (Ios, fictionalized here as the femme Greek name Eftychia, meaning “Happiness”). Plenty culture-clash humor ensues, with jokes about how the island’s taxi cabs are a fleet of donkeys and their showers are buckets of water poured from rooftops. That humor works best when it’s weaponized against the visiting Americans (such as when Ios villagers laugh at an American lawyer’s shyness over bathing nude in public) or when it’s accompanied by an island-wide song & dance number, Mamma Mia!–style. What makes the film interesting the context of its Movies from Ios listing is the way Aliki & her newfound American beau eventually join together to prevent the island from being bought & taken over by real estate developers. The villains of the film want to exploit Ios by transforming the island into the exact tourist trap it had become by the time Ginger & Cinnamon was filmed there, and the triumph of the film is in preventing that tragedy just as much as it’s in the unlikely central romance. It’s also worth noting that this success is accomplished via the discovery of a secret “hamburger sauce” recipe (not unlike the titular cake recipe in Ginger & Cinnamon). It’s all very silly.

The Movies from Ios page notes that during the filming of Ginger & Cinnamon, “The film crew tried to close off parts of the village during some nights as they made the movie. This was quite annoying to the tourists on the island as they were trying to have a good time in the bars and nightclubs.“ The bittersweet joy of Aliki My Love is that it concludes as a fantasy where neither the tourists nor that film crew would have descended upon the island at all, leaving it as an untouched Eden instead of a Party Island nightclubbing destination. Ios is still beautiful, but there’s major cultural difference between its two cinematic representations in Aliki My Love and Ginger & Cinnamon, neither of which put much of a positive spin on Ios’s tourism-dependent modernity. One shows the island at a tipping point where it might have been saved from descending into the boozy tourist trap it would eventually become; the other updates the picture to show that it’s now too late for the island to ever turn back. It’s bizarre to see either featured on a website devoted to attracting more customers into that very industry.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, the horned up Italian romcom Ginger & Cinnamon (2003), check out our Swampchat discussion, our look at its musicarello inspirations, and last week’s investigation of how a theme song to a Japanese anime television show found its way on the soundtrack.

-Brandon Ledet

Long Shot (2019)

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In a lot of ways, the Seth Rogen/Charlize Theron two-hander Long Shot is a traditional, by the books romcom. Two socially mismatched idealists spark an unlikely romance after a chance meeting in the first act, then gradually learn to be more like each other through the ups & downs of their early months together (most romcoms bail before the real work of building a relationship starts, once that early emotional rush cools down). It’s arguable that Seth Rogen’s overgrown stoner-bro humor is a little out of place in that context, but the Apatow style of modern comedies where he cut his teeth were basically just romcoms with some lagniappe improv takes, so even that influence isn’t much of a subversion. If you find it comforting to watch two characters fall in love over a series of quippy one-liners and farcical misunderstandings, Long Shot is more than willing to deliver the formulaic romcom goods, building an amiable romance between two adorable leads with oddly believable chemistry. What’s really interesting about the film is how it manages to pull that off while discussing something most formulaic romcoms actively avoid: politics.

Charlize Theron plays a US Secretary of State who’s poised to make her first presidential bid in an upcoming election. Against the guidance of her campaign advisors, she hires Seth Rogen as her speech writer for the early stages of the campaign trail – both because she respects his leftist idealism and because she thinks he’s cute. In apolitical romcom tradition, the unlikely couple inspire each other to edge closer towards the political center from their extremist starting points. Theron relearns to stick to her guns ideologically without giving up too much in political compromise, while Rogen learns that compromise & reaching across the aisle are sometimes necessary to accomplish larger goals. It’s a relatively safe, careful approach to modern politics – an arena defined by increasingly violent extremes. As such, the movie leaves little room to make clearly stated, concrete political points without risking the fun-for-everyone charm of romcoms. Its only clear political stances are detectable in Theron’s campaign platform that centers The Environment, and in the way working in the news media spotlight is unfairly difficult for her as a woman. As far as modern political topics go, gendered scrutiny & saving the trees are about as safe as the movie could have played it, and you can feel it struggling with how political is too political for a romcom when addressing nearly every other topic.

One major way Long Shot avoids alienating half of its audience with its political stances is avoiding declaring which political parties it’s actually talking about from scene to scene. Theron’s environmentalist crusade and the feminist lens through which she views media coverage of her public persona both suggest that she’s a registered Democrat, but the movie is careful to never make that association explicit. Her role as Secretary of State is in service of a bumbling president (Bob Odenkirk) who is even more amorphous in his declared politics. Neither Democrat nor Republican (at least not explicitly) Odenkirk is a cipher for more universally acceptable jokes about how all politicians are more obsessed with celebrity than policy and how they’re all corrupt goons in lobbyists’ pockets. The only time I can recall the words “Democrat” or “Republican” being verbally acknowledged in the film is when Rogen is mocked for being horrified by the revelation that his best friend (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) is a member of the GOP, when he supposedly should be willing to find common political ground with his best bud. That’s a tough pill to swallow in a time when Republicans are actively trying to outlaw abortion access and in a time when, as acknowledged in the film’s opening gag, many “Conservatives” are literal Nazis hiding in plain sight. Still, it’s the only position the film can really take without risking its traditional romcom cred.

For a more daring example of how the romcom template can productively clash with modern politics, the Jenny Slate vehicle Obvious Child is commendable in the way it plays with the genre’s tropes while also frankly discussing Pro-Choice stances on reproductive rights. The closest Long Shot gets to saying something specific & potentially alienating about modern politics is in its parodies of Fox News media coverage (complete with Andy Serkis posing as a hideous prosthetics-monster version of Rupert Murdoch), which is a joke that writes itself. The difference there is that Obvious Child is a subversion of the romcom template, one that nudges the genre closer to an indie drama sensibility. By contrast, Long Shot is more of an earnest participation in the genuine thing. It is, for better or for worse, a formulaic romcom – with all the charming interpersonal relationships & tiptoeing political rhetoric that genre implies. I can say for sure that the romantic chemistry between Theron & Rogen works completely. The gamble of bringing modern politics into an inherently apolitical genre template is a little less decidedly successful, but at least makes for an interesting tension between form & content.

-Brandon Ledet