Some Enchanted Week

For Harrison Ford, 1998's Six Days, Seven Nights was just another in a string of lukewarm, forgettable films. For Anne Heche, who suffered a painful death after a horrific car accident last year, it was the biggest role of her career. It was directed by Ivan Reitman, who also died last year. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

Ford and Heche both give good performances that don't quite line up with their characters. Ford's famous for playing scoundrels but here he plays a horny scoundrel, something that tends to make a romantic lead much less attractive. It worked for Bill Murray in Ghostbusters but with Ford it's hard to shake the feeling he's Deckard play-acting to get into the Zhora's dressing room.

He and Anne Heche have no chemistry. Neither seems really into the other. I believe Heche as a high powered magazine editor. But there's something cold about her in the film and I can't imagine her being attracted to anyone. It doesn't help that not one single joke lands in this purported comedy. I never laughed. Some of the action adventure stuff, though, is pretty good and I wonder if this film would have done better if it'd given up on any idea of being a comedy.

I like how much practical effects were used and the location shooting. Ford, as a scoundrel pilot taking advantage of tourists, is arguably even closer to Charleton Heston's character in Secret of the Incas than he was in the Indiana Jones movies. He and Heche run afoul of pirates played by Temuera Morrison and Danny Trejo.

Impeccable casting there. I wish the film had focused more on fights with pirates.

Six Days, Seven Nights is available on Disney+ outside the US.

Twitter Sonnet #1669

With masks and masks we met the op'ra ghost.
Revolving canes precede the sausage joke.
Divergent routes commend our loopy host.
No wonder that the squeaky ride was broke.
Confections filled the box with testy frogs.
Advancing eyes were curled beyond a hope.
Euphoric futures pass behind the fogs.
Another night the Phantom ties a rope.
Rotund with hope, the plane began to climb.
Resurging sea would scrape the flyer down.
Emerging beasts resist the parent slime.
Ahead awaits the unsuspecting town.
Below the choppy plane the waves await.
Behind the slender years they offer bait.

Clothes Make the Size

How's a working class girl supposed to get ahead in the cutthroat world of business? In 1988's Working Girl, the answer is elaborate deception, which is also apparently pretty standard anyway. It's an entertaining romantic comedy, too, and Melanie Griffith is very sweet as the star.

She plays Tess, an office worker who got a BA at night school. Her best friend is played by Joan Cusack and I'd swear their wardrobe was inspired by Jean Marais in La Belle et la Bete.

I don't remember people dressing so big in the '80s whose names weren't David Byrne. But maybe it was a working class New York thing.

She gets a job working for Sigourney Weaver who turns out to be the film's villain. A lesser actress would've suited the film just fine but I love how Weaver makes Katharine subtle. When she tells Tess she honours her ideas and wants to help her get ahead, the viewer is as unsure as Tess is whether or not Katharine is being genuine or patronising. Then, of course, Tess discovers Katharine was planning to steal Tess' idea about acquiring a radio station for a big company.

After Katharine breaks her leg skiing and asks Tess to manage things for her, Tess decides to pretend she's at Katharine's level in the company. This leads to her partnering professionally and romantically with Harrison Ford.

He has an interesting line when he picks her up at a bar--"You're the first woman I've seen at one of these damned things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman." That's a lot of thought put into her simple little black dress, even if that dress was revealed to have cost six thousand dollars in an earlier, amusing scene where she and Joan Cusack pilfered it from Katharine's wardrobe ("And it's not even leather!" says Cusack). But what does it mean? He's a man, so how would he know what a woman would choose? Though, since the film's costume designer is a woman, a woman presumably did choose it. I think it's a long way of saying it doesn't look slutty, the presumption being that if a man were suddenly in a woman's body, he'd dress to be seen by himself. This all sounds like a Male Gaze discussion and incurs many of the logical problems inevitable if anyone thinks too deeply about it. Though it becomes more interesting when Tess meets Ford's character again at a board room meeting.

And I thought, my God, she's the spitting image of Kim Novak in Vertigo.

And I thought further--she's a working class girl dressing as an upper class woman and attracts a man in the process. And there's even a scene where he carries her home unconscious, undresses her, and puts her in his bed and treats the event like it was totally innocent. It makes me wonder if there was a stage in which this movie was meant to go in another direction.

The second half of the film isn't as intriguingly weird as the first. There's a big boardroom showdown that's a bit silly but also pretty satisfying.

Working Girl is available on Disney+ in most countries (not the U.S. or Japan).

The Robber and the Rabbi of the Old West

In theory a Western comedy starring Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford doesn't seem like necessarily a bad idea. But 1979's The Frisco Kid stumbles primarily on the conceptual level; in never finds a good tone for its initial idea. Mostly the ingredients are fine, particularly the stars, and I found myself liking the characters played by Wilder and Ford. And I found myself regarding the screenplay as the film's true villain for what it was doing to such a nice couple of guys.

Wilder plays a young man named Avram Belinski who leaves Poland at the beginning of the film to be the new rabbi for a congregation in San Francisco. His naivete and inexperience quickly get him into trouble and he's robbed on the road in Pennsylvania, the three crooks leaving him stranded in his underwear. It's a scene that seems like it was meant to be funny but just comes off as sad.

Avram's relieved to find most of his possessions abandoned on the road; he's especially happy to find his Torah, and I was happy he got it back, too--it seemed a particularly sadistic thing for the thief to take. Already I was pulling for Avram even as the energy of the scenes seemed to imply I was meant to be laughing at him.

He comes across a group of Amish farmers (it's hard to remember this is supposed to be Pennsylvania from the landscape) and he mistakes them for Jews. Certainly their attire is similar but this was another thing that seems like it was meant to be funny but works out to be just mildly interesting and very quickly I wondered why the film was dwelling on this.

When Avram finally meets Tommy Lillard, the bank robber played by Harrison Ford, the film continues its theme of Avram and the people he meets being surprised by differences and commonalities between Jews and everyone else. There's a particularly lame joke about horse tucus.

But the two actors have so much charisma that their friendship becomes genuinely sweet. Tommy knows his way around the wild west better than Avram but in his own way he clearly needs guidance and I liked the conclusion of the film which was very much about what being a rabbi can mean in the wild west. It's a nice sentiment if positioned in awkwardly contrived circumstances.

It was nice seeing Wilder in such a low key role, too. His face often seems like its ready to burst forth with some barely contained emotion so it's really effective when it doesn't, his eyes just water and his face turns red. And then a moment later he pulls it all back in--he's really good. Harrison Ford, of course, has that rough charm which mixes well with a quality of innocence I don't think I've seen in any of his other roles. If only the film didn't waste so much time trying to make jokes that simply weren't there.

Twitter Sonnet #1193

Escorted lakes surpass the lines of code.
In vapour stretches dawn adorns the hill.
With rounded fingers jeeps proclaim the mode.
In deeper layers currents carve a will.
The central names appeared beside the spine.
On ev'ry rib a people grew a field.
Inside the lung a scent of brittle pine.
A forest overshadows harvest yield.
The skinny ants conduct along the ridge.
Behind the dawn a night'll soon begin.
A bug replaced a bug beneath the fridge.
A wire swapped a car for seats within.
Sapphire sharks were tiny specks on ties.
A set of suits prepared a starched surprise.