Click. Instant Moral!
I haven’t seen Click. I certainly don’t intend to, because I can’t stand Adam Sandler, and, from the trailer I saw, the plot looks like a re-hash of Bruce Almighty. (Which isn’t surprising actually, since I’ve just learned that the two movies were written by the same people.)
But here’s an interesting (she’s also the one who wrote the article analyzing the recent “religious” trend in movies that I referenced last month). She discusses how Click and other movies like it spend the entire film making something look desirable to the audience, and then, in a slapdash attempt at a moral, hastily explain that this something doesn’t really pay off.
I haven’t seen many of the films she mentions here (except Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which she singles out as a film that doesn’t tack on a unbelievable moral), so I can’t say much about them. It’s something that has always bothered me about Disney-esque teen movies, which preach “be yourself” ad nauseam at the same time that, in order to be “herself,” the heroine has to straighten her naturally curly hair, lose her glasses, and stop using so many big words. I’m thinking The Princess Diaries here, but there are plenty of other examples–and not just for teens. From what I’ve heard, The Princess Diaries‘ star Anne Hathaway undergoes a similar transformation once again in The Devil Wears Prada.
And then there’s my favorite sentence from the article: “more and more comedies are punishing their characters’ ambition and success even when that successful life is portrayed as desirable.” Ah, the joy of capitalist schizophrenia.
Here’s my question, though: how new do you think this double-message trend is? If it’s only surfaced recently, why? What has brought it about?
P.S. Thanks to “K” for calling the James article to my attention!
3 comments June 30th, 2006