The Dream Machine

Monday night I watched the next Netflix selection in my queue, Two Weeks Notice, starring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock.

Yeah, I watched a chick-flick. Alone. You got a problem widdat?

It was sweet, funny, sexy, formulaic and predictable. I doubt the Roger Eberts, Leonard Maltins, and the A.O. Scotts of the nation gave this 2002 film very high marks, but the movie knows where your buttons are and when to push them.

As it finished I realized that this was the same romantic comedy I had ever seen starring either of the two stars. Grant played the same charming, womanizing, wealthy cad he seems to always play, who — somewhere in the middle of the film — realizes that he's in love with the same clumsy, intelligent, understatedly-pretty-until-the-"a-ha!"-moment, opinionated-but-lonely, pain-in-the-ass woman, that Sandra Bullock seems to always play.

I've always been one to scoff at people who won't go see a movie because they don't like a particular actor. What difference does it make, I've argued, he/she is portraying a character, not him/herself! And, at some levels I know I'm right. Most film actors must be able to get out of that wet paper bag if they're going to carry that 70-million-dollar picture.

But Sunday evening — very briefly — I saw the world more as it is than as I think it should be. Maybe it was too much V8 and chocolate, I don't know. But as I felt my buttons being pushed in the right order at the right time, it occurred to me that these two stars didn't have to break out of anything in this movie. Most of the English-speaking, movie-going world like Hugh Grant — certainly the women, anyway — and they want him to be the sexy, naughty boy who gets hooked by the klutzy, plain girl. They like Sandra Bullock as that klutz who wins the guy over without even trying, and who is filmed with softer and softer focus throughout the film to accentuate the beauty that her leading man is supposedly seeing — not to mention the stalwart men's men who bravely accompany their girlfriends and wives to these films. You have to give them something to look at between all the girl-talk and winsome expressions.

This is what we want as a collective audience. We men want to identify with the charismatic playboy who finds the diamond in the rough. Women want to identify with the smart, sassy, everyday girl with one killer outfit that knocks the playboy off his horse. Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock are repeatedly given these roles because we're comfortable with their faces and with their schtik, and we like how they make us feel at the end when they finally kiss.

But, oh, does that swelling-music, circling camera, fuzzy-focus love ever truly happen in the real world? I think not. I believe it's a myth perpetuated by the Hollywood dream machine as "the hope."

And now I sorta have a thing for Sandra Bullock.



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