Bryce Zabel's MOVIE SMACKDOWN!

Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) -vs- When Harry Met Sally... (1989)

Love Amid the Party Favors

The Smackdown. I can’t criticize anyone who’s not struck by the party mood as 2008 lurches to a merciful end. Recession, foreclosures, unemployment. Really, what’s to celebrate, so let’s see how a pair of seasonal movies rise above the gloom. The characters that populate “When Harry Met Sally…” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” survive the holiday gauntlet with their dignity intact. Both films beat back loneliness and offer inspiration. These days we’re all looking for that recipe. That’s what this Smackdown is all about: Whose New Year’s Eve party do you want to attend?   

Director Rob Reiner struck gold “When Harry Met Sally…” opened in 1989. The package had everything: a smart, Oscar nominated script from Nora Ephron, and several memorable scenes replayed and parodied over the years. The performances still hold up. Surrounding this is great music from both Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington.

“Bridget Jones’s Diary” quickly found a worldwide audience in Sharon Maguire’s 2001 feature film directorial debut. Helen Fielding, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis adapted Fielding’s popular novel about a London woman concerned about love, her career prospects and her weight. Renee Zellweger shows an easy comic touch with a British accent.

Both movies offer much to celebrate; one more than the other.

The Challenger. After another lousy New Year’s Eve, Bridget Jones starts keeping a diary amid high hopes. She wants to drop some weight, cut back on smoking and drink less. Bridget is not very successful there, or in love. She falls for her scoundrel boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), who likes her well enough until a new thrill comes along. Cleaver is charming, predatory, funny and betrayal comes easily for him. Just ask lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) whose wife ran off with his best man, Daniel Cleaver. Bridget’s parents (Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones) fitfully try to match her with Darcy. He’s becoming interested in a roundabout way but Bridget is not. She’s too busy with her new job as a TV reporter. It’s not going well until Darcy helps her land the big interview. Bridget is still enthralled by the scraps of attention Cleaver tosses her way. Mark Darcy barely shows his cards: “..What I’m trying to say..very inarticulately.. is that despite appearances I like you. Very much.” Bit by bit Bridget’s eyes are opened to Darcy’s submerged decency and Cleaver’s utter lack of character.

Last Chance Harvey (2008) -vs- Something's Gotta Give (2003)

Acting Their Age?

The Smackdown.  The great thing about being famous, one has to imagine, is that when you get older there are still lots of people who want to have sex with you.  Maybe that's the same dynamic that drives superstar actors to sign on for that one last film where they get to play a character "of a certain age" who still can get laid by an attractive member of the opposite sex.  It's the cinematic way of telling the world, "I've still got it!"  Our Smackdown pits two popular male stars against each other, both came of age in the 60s and are now well into or past their own sixties.  In these films, they get to play romantic leads finding love late in life even though, shall we say, they ain't quite lookin' the part.  Our two actors both play characters with the same initials (H.S.), Jack Nicholson (Harry Sanborn) and Dustin Hoffman (Harvey Shine).  Both characters need to make up for lifetimes of mistakes by finding the right love interest for their final act.  Will they get their women?  Well, come on now, it's Jack and Dustin.  What do you think?

The Challenger.  Dustin Hoffman plays Harvey Shine, a failing (and flailing) music jingle writer in "Last Chance Harvey."  British writer/director Joel Hopkins shoots the whole thing on location in London where, as it turns out, Harvey has landed to see his daughter married.  The rehearsal dinner is a disaster, he looks a fool and before he can skulk out of town he gets fired long-distance.  While he's licking his wounds in an airport bar, he runs into the bookish Kate Walker and, although sparks never fly between them, they do, sort of, maybe, start to hit it off.  They're both living lives of quiet romantic desperation.  She talks him into sticking around to be a real part of his daughter's wedding dinner and he does because she's right and because he really is starting to like this woman.  There are details to follow but not a one that will cause you any real doubt about how this is going to work out.

Twilight (2008) -vs- Edward Scissorhands (1990)

Edwardian Romance

The Smackdown. Teenaged girls are a force to be reckoned with. Like tsunamis and hurricanes. Oh sure, industry wisdom has it that teenaged boys go to the movies; they're the prime target audience. Anyone who ventures into the multiplex in the heat of summer knows that. But never underestimate the awesome power that is a teenaged girl with a crush...for that crush can easily become an obsession...and that obsession can turn into some serious cash. Witness last weekend's seventy million dollar box office take for the eminently crushworthy vampire teen romance, "Twilight."  For almost twenty years, "Edward Scissorhands" has been my uncontested poster boy for doomed Gothic-tinged star-crossed romance. Can Edward Cullen, Twilight's fangless undead hunk unseat Tim Burton's most memorable creation? It's the Battle of the Edwards...a Battle to the Death. And beyond.

The Challenger. Well, she was just seventeen. You know what I mean. Bella Swan. Barely enough blood in her brooding body to bring a blush to those perfectly smooth cheeks. Listless. Lifeless. Secretive. So deeply sensitive that the slightest of smiles might overstate any case for happiness. A child of divorce shuttled between dry hot Arizona and cold damp Washington State. Phoenix to Forks. Frying pan into the fire.

"Twilight" is the blue-hued film that perfectly captures all the angst, ennui and bliss of being a teenager in love. Based on the incredibly hot series of novels by Stephenie Meyer and brought to the big screen by director Catherine ("Thirteen") Hardwicke and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, what we have here is a chick-let flick of impeccable pedigree. 

The Women (2008) -vs- Sex And The City (2008)

Women with Shoes

The Smackdown. After fifteen years in development, TV comedy queen Diane English ("Murphy Brown") has finally completed her Magnum Opus: a star-spangled remake of 1939’s "The Women."  Sixty-nine years after that classic film’s original release, the remake of "The Women" follows in the high-heeled footsteps and huge box office wake of this summer’s earlier "Sex And The City."  The two movies are remarkably similar, sharing an unapologetic chickflick sensibility and Ladies Only appeal. 

Both films claim to reflect a kind of reality and instead mirror an uppercrust New York City where money is never an issue, a New York City where walking a mile even in your own shoes is unthinkable.  Shoes aren’t for walking; they’re for collecting, and they render their owners hobbled Geisha girls suited only to taking tiny baby steps on pristine boulevards, linking arms for balance, in search of more shoes and more men.  Freud suggests that shoes are a symbol for female genitalia.  Movies suggest they are no longer symbolic at all, but replacements.

So it’s a catfight to the finish.  Or wait.  Could "The Women" be just a pale imitation of an imitation arriving a little too late to cash in to the zeitgeist?  Timing (and those shoes) are everything.

The Challenger.  Everyone in "The Women" goes to Saks! Everyone in the movie is a woman! Society woman Mary Haines discovers her husband is having an illicit affair. Her group of friends stick their noses in her business. Somebody has a baby. Nobody worries about money. They live in New York City and Connecticut, but most of the people are white and rich. We learn early on that several characters are very witty, but we never actually hear anything that convinces us of this. They change clothes a lot.

The House Bunny (2008) -vs- Legally Blonde (2001)

Blonde Versus the Bored of Education

The Smackdown. Are you the kind of person who demands meaning in your movies?  Here are two films that each serve up a whopper of a morality tale: Not just any blonde can successfully take on the world of higher education, but experience in a Playboy bunny costume sure helps. SoCal sorority girl Elle "Dumb Like A Fox" Woods dons her bunny ears at a party and goes on to conquer Harvard Law.  Party girl and aspiring centerfold Shelly "Dumb Like A Sexy Forrest Gump" Darlingson leaves her bunny ears at the Playboy mansion and rescues a failing sorority filled with losers. Gee. Golly. Gosh. Get out the peroxide, grab your library card, and start up the montage music. This one’s gonna get (a lot less) ugly.

The Challenger. So there are movies you go to expecting quite a lot. And there are movies you go to expecting precious little.  And then there's "The House Bunny."  Written by the same people who simultaneously set back feminism and catapulted the very winning Reese Witherspoon to indisputable stardom with "Legally Blonde," "The House Bunny" promises to set back not only feminism and the usually charming Anna Faris, but to lower your IQ, GPA, and quite possibly your immune system.

In the screenwriters’ hamhanded effort to make their aspiring centerfold dimwit sympathetic, they manage to turn Family Values on its deserving and pointy little head. Little Orphan Shelly never gets adopted and instead finds her first surrogate family in the Playboy Mansion and her second family as house mother to a doomed sorority at a college where no one studies or goes to class. You know the college. Movie U where impossibly attractive stereotypes drink,  party, go Greek, and flirt, but they learn nothing until the pretentious life lesson speech usually delivered in the third act by the protagonist. Oh. That college.