FRESH FOR '07, SUCKAZ

I thought that I would break my extended blogging silence by doing what I usually do anyway, and bitch about popular culture. So without further ado:

A few weeks ago, I saw The Holiday. I will not attempt to justify this decision.

The movie was schmalz. Twice during the schmalzfest, the audience was visited with a now-standard moviegoing trope that is unique for having been unpacked and discredited by High Fidelity, the movie that introduced it. The Holiday twists the cliche in that it is the two woman protagonists who perpetrate it; this is of course a standard chick-flick/rom-com cliche in itself, but this second layer of cliche is weakened by the fact that the filmmakers seem to be unaware that they are doing it.

The cliche is the Soundtrack Spiritual Litmus Test. As per High Fidelity, it is the use of the "right" music to signify less that a person is a member of a clique or subculture, or even that a person has certain tastes or a certain degree of discernment, than that a person has the right sort of character or moral attainment, expressed as aesthetic judgment. Another smash-hit use of the cliche is in the Shins-driven meet-cute scene in Garden State. Of course, in High Fidelity the idea was introduced to reflect the supposed social reality that there are people who do subject their acquaintances to exactly such a test, rather than just people who gravitate to others with similar tastes.

Once each during the movie, the Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz characters, who have swapped houses over Christmas, demonstrate to the audience that they are the same sort of great people by "rocking out" to songs cribbed from the other's record collections.

As an aside, I would like to point out that one of the songs was Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl", which proves by the cliche's own logic that the two main characters are vile.

I have probably now just bitten off more than I can chew: A complex cliche composed of the boy-flick standard SSLT, and the chick-flick standard Sisters Gonna Exhibit Stereotyped Masculine Behavior For Ourselves, slightly modified to admit the fact that the stereotype males who engage in SSLT in film are generally fairly "sensitive". Because I don't feel like taking on the underlying ideology of any of these cliches, which are probably only the result of lazy characterization, and to the extent to which they do represent something deeper are beyond the range of my interest at this exact moment (late, tired), I am going to stop now. Maybe I will pick back up later.