Rock Hudson and Doris Day starred in only three movies together, but their names are forever conjoined in the cultural memory, signifying the guilty pleasures of a supposedly more innocent era. The comedies they made for Universal from the late 1950's to the mid-60's -- with each other and with surrogates ranging from Cary Grant to Gina Lollobrigida were the product of a moment when the incipient sexual revolution collided with the moribund Hollywood Production Code in an explosion of bright color, lush music and naughty innuendo.
These entertainments (Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers) were at once dopey and ingenious, wholesome and sophisticated, teasing their audiences, as the romantic principals teased each other, by pretending to be what they were not: subversive when they were in fact conventional, and vice versa.
Down With Love, Peyton Reed's buoyant homage to the Hudson-Day pictures, wears its affection for that bygone era on its sleeve. And also on its collars, ties, hats, cuff links, dressing gowns, slim tuxedos and curvy sheaths. Every inch of every Cinemascope frame -- from the zippy title credits to the geographically absurd Manhattan sets to the modular furniture to the glass martini pitchers -- is designed to plunge you into a fairy-tale 1962. Marc Shaiman's score deftly blends finger-popping lounge jazz with velvety orchestral swoons, while Jeff Cronenweth's cinematography approximates the bold, viscous tones of old-fashioned Technicolor.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
The Hudson-Day roles are taken up by Ewan McGregor and Rene Zellweger, unflappable veterans of the recent campaign to revive the movie musical. They demonstrate together, as they did (separately) in Moulin Rouge and Chicago, a thoroughly charming immunity to embarrassment. They also remind you that the real Rock Hudson and Doris Day flourished in the days before personal trainers, Diet Coke and the Atkins Diet turned Hollywood into the land of ropy biceps and flat tummies. McGregor's wiry, wolfish energy is more like the young Sinatra than the bulky, slow-moving Hudson, but never mind. His high-flying playboy, a magazine writer named Catcher Block, is a lithe Lothario, a woman's man, a man's man, a man about town.
And if Zellweger puckers where Day might have grimaced, she manages, as Day did, to swivel engagingly between goofiness and sex appeal, and to look her grown-up age even when she is called upon to be utterly childish.
Like Civil War enthusiasts in a Virginia cow pasture, Zellweger and McGregor don period costumes to re-enact a legendary skirmish in the battle of the sexes. Their fidelity to the past is impressive, but it is hard to see the point of the exercise, or to feel that much is at stake.
Zellweger is Barbara Novak, who arrives in Manhattan from Maine to oversee the publication of her book, Down With Love, an antiromantic manifesto that argues for the equality of the sexes in matters sexual and professional. Her smart, neurotic, chain-smoking editor, Vicki Hiller (Sarah Paulson), wants Barbara to be profiled by Catcher, a prize-winning gadabout journalist for a men's magazine called Know.
After a deliciously contrived setup, Catcher decides to write an expose, which he will clinch by making Barbara, who is dogmatically committed to casual sex, fall in love with him. This he does through the elaborately offhand ruse of pretending to be an astronaut, which involves putting on glasses, covering his Scot's burr in a mock-Texas twang and swapping his gadget-filled bachelor pad for the fussy digs of Peter McMannus (David Hyde Pierce), his editor and foil.
Pierce, ever the paragon of uptight prissiness, is playing what was, 40 years ago, the Tony Randall role, and it is delightful to see Randall himself saunter through a scene or two, bestowing his sly, patriarchal blessing. Down With Love works hard to earn it and is, for the most part, intelligent and amusing, even if it never achieves the full-tilt zany desperation of Delbert Mann's Lover Come Back, the best of the real Hudson-Day movies.
Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, the screenwriters, have shaken together a canny cocktail of period vernacular and deliberately labored double entendres, some of which extend for entire scenes. The best moments have a glorious, hectic artificiality, emphasized by split screens, gimmicky editing and the obviously cardboard three-quarter moon that bobs in the ersatz Manhattan sky.
As always, the final destination on this jaunt is matrimony, and the filmmakers, so meticulous in their imitation of the dress and decor of the Kennedy era, are unabashed revisionists in matters of sexual politics. Their tribute is also an updating and a critique, informed by the commonsensical feminism that Barbara Novak's best seller parodies and also by an impatience with the hypocrisy that was the source of all the fun to begin with. This movie can, without blushing, make jokes that acknowledge the existence of premarital and nonheterosexual sex, things that its ancestors could address only in code.
The obsolescence of that code -- and of the Code itself -- has the effect of flattening out the movie's humor and making its strenuous cleverness feel, in the end, more dutiful than daring. The most obvious recent point of comparison is Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, which was devoted to reanimating the Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk, several starring Hudson. (Down With Love and Far From Heaven might best be described as offerings to the memory of Ross Hunter, who produced both Pillow Talk and Sirk's Imitation of Life in the same year.)
Haynes plunged into the subtext of the old movies, exploring their deep springs of anxiety about race, marriage and sexual identity. Some of these were present in the comedies as well: their hectic ridiculousness reflected a world in which the rules of conduct were being rapidly rewritten.
But Reed snips that subtext away, and his movie takes the mandate of inoffensiveness much more seriously than its winking, tongue-in-cheek predecessors ever did. As it tweaks the attitudes and behaviors of the past, Down With Love is careful to uphold the right-thinking norms of the present, denying the audience the pleasures of subversion and satire and managing, in spite of its knowing good cheer, to be less sophisticated than what it imitates.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby