Or – I mean, hang on – nine stone was a problem? Yes, it was. Perhaps Hugh Grant began to break that mould when he persuaded Bridget Jones that he genuinely liked her neuroses, her big pants and her nine-stone body.
Hugh Grant and Renée Zellweger In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). Unless you were very funny, and could sing (Barbra Streisand and Cher could get away with not being blond), love was for slender straight white girls and square-jawed straight white boys. Janis Ian told us decades ago that love is made for beauty queens, and in romcom world that stood for decades. The comedy must never be neglected, and if comedy isn’t taking the mick out of the society it grew from, it’s not doing its job.Īs our stuff changes, we change too. The capri pants, the big pants, the drag pants. They must dance to different music, from big bands to Dansettes to Bluetooth. The tech by which the couple fails to communicate properly must move on, from the tiny boudoir telephones of the 1930s and the giant mobiles of the 1980s to the texts which now pop up on the big screen as the actors gaze down at their small screens. But each generation needs its own in-jokes, its own music, clothes and reference points.
We can just watch the old ones when we want a trip to that special magical world where the transcendent and overwhelming value of romantic love above everything else is taken as given.
Doris and Rock, Tom and Meg, Jude and Cameron, Kate and Jack, Hugh and Julia (and Renée, and Andie) saw us through the last of the 20th century. Photograph: Ronald Grantįred and Ginger, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy and William Powell saw our cinema-going ancestors through the 1930s, when the chicks were cool, screwball and good at their jobs, and the 1940s, when domestic stability was required. Rosalind Russell showed Cary Grant who was boss in His Girl Friday (1940).
0 kommentar(er)
