Even the title is evocative: Mr and Mrs Smith calls to mind a classic Hollywood star vehicle of the past, the identically named 1941 movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In that picture, two stars of the era, Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard, played a "squabbling Punch and Judy," according to the New York Times review.
Today's Mr and Mrs Smith, played by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie -- as everyone within range of a billboard or bus stop must know by now -- are still squabbling. But now they are hired killers, working for rival companies, who set out to assassinate each other.
Almost in spite of itself, the new movie remains a romantic comedy in the tradition that Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra perfected more than half a century ago. Those giant figures of Pitt and Jolie in the omnipresent marketing campaign descend from the heyday of Gable and Lombard, when such glamour treatment was lavished on major stars.
While movie stars now command far heftier salaries than those legendary performers ever dreamed of -- and still have a lock on the US' magazine covers -- it's actually rare to find a movie today that is motored by sheer star power. As films grew more expensive, studios got nervous about entrusting them to mere mortals. Instead, they began to shelter even the biggest stars with special effects, comic-book trappings or familiar franchises.
In the latest version of War of the Worlds, for example, Tom Cruise has to do little more than look terrified or ferociously determined as he battles alien invaders; the main attractions are the flying saucers and the spectacular conflagrations. In the new adaptation of the television series Bewitched, Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell are depending on viewers' affection for beloved sitcom characters. The concept is the star, and the actors are really just along for a ride on the broomstick.
Pitt and Jolie, of course, will be surrounded by expensive special effects and ferocious gunbattles when Mr and Mrs Smith opens this week. But the pair will still have to banter, flirt, display their star wattage -- and put their oversized celebrity personas on the line.
In that sense this new movie is a lot more demanding than their other recent projects. Pitt was basically a piece of swinging weaponry in Troy, and he melted into the wisecracking ensembles of Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve, while Jolie struck poses as Lara Croft and spouted an indecipherable accent for her supporting role in the stillborn Alexander.
In their new movie, the two actors will have to face the music. They're both front and center in a battle-of-the-sexes comedy that depends on movie-star magnetism. The question audiences will answer is whether these two highly publicized stars have the sizzle to keep a vital romantic movie tradition alive. And an even more important question hangs in the balance: Does Hollywood still have the know-how to refresh one of its tastiest formulas?
When It Happened One Night swept the Oscars in 1934, it established a new kind of romantic comedy, one that depended on a battle of wits between two strong-willed lovers. In that movie, Claudette Colbert played a runaway heiress, and Clark Gable was a cynical newspaper reporter who didn't let on that he knew her real identity. In other words, their relationship was marked by suspicion and deception as well as by an undercurrent of desire, and that mixture of attraction and antagonism is what some of the best romantic movies possess.
Howard Hawks played many variations on this formula in films like Twentieth Century (with John Barrymore as a theatrical impresario and Carole Lombard as the temperamental actress he discovered) and His Girl Friday (with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as formerly married journalists wrangling in the newsroom).
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn struck sparks (both on screen and off) in the first movie they made together, Woman of the Year, and they continued to spar in many of their later romantic comedies, most notably in Adam's Rib, when they played married lawyers who found themselves on opposite sides of a criminal trial. In some of the most memorable scenes in that movie, their verbal jousts give way to physical jabs, as when he slaps her behind while giving her a rubdown and later when she kicks him viciously in the shins.
In Pillow Talk (1959) and again in Lover Come Back (1961), Doris Day and Rock Hudson also played professional rivals who engaged in lies, dirty tricks and sadistic humiliations before their inevitable final clinch. A higher level of danger entered the picture in Hitchcock's 1959 caper, North by Northwest, when Cary Grant exchanged teasing innuendoes with the sultry Eva Marie Saint, who happened to be in cahoots with the spies plotting to kill him.
Stanley Donen's Charade (1963) worked its own stylish variations on the Hitchcockian formula. Grant and Audrey Hepburn slipped into a mating dance flecked with menace; she was unsure until the very end of the movie whether he was a lover or a murderer in search of the fortune left by her late husband. The movie was criticized at the time for daring to mix lighthearted romantic comedy with macabre violence, an explosive combo that is driven to its illogical conclusion in Mr and Mrs Smith.
It seems likely that Simon Kinberg, the writer of Mr and Mrs Smith, and Doug Liman, the director, had some of these earlier movies -- or more recent iterations, like John Huston's Prizzi's Honor and Danny De Vito's War of the Roses -- firmly in mind while they were creating their black comedy. But this new picture highlights the dramatic changes in the cinematic landscape over the last half century.
What could once be expressed entirely in witty repartee and suggestive physical byplay (like Colbert extending her leg to flag down a ride in It Happened One Night), or later in the brutal verbiage of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, now requires the kinetic energy of punches, kicks, shooting and stabbing.
Movies have grown darker over the decades, but they've also grown more insecure. Filmmakers and studio executives no longer trust such niceties as dialogue, characterization, style or even movie-star charisma to involve viewers in lovers' conflicts. Instead, today's filmmakers feel the need to pump up the volume and ramp up the firepower to make sure they hold the interest of impatient audiences.
Yet Pitt and Jolie, though backed by a deafening array of explosions, can't escape their challenge in this one. There is virtually no supporting cast; the only other actor with a significant role, Vince Vaughn, doesn't even get a screen credit. So the two stars, if they succeed in igniting the box office, may not exactly revive the genre of scintillating romantic comedy. But they will have kept it from dying out altogether.
Jason Han says that the e-arrival card spat between South Korea and Taiwan shows that Seoul is signaling adherence to its “one-China” policy, while Taiwan’s response reflects a reciprocal approach. “Attempts to alter the diplomatic status quo often lead to tit-for-tat responses,” the analyst on international affairs tells the Taipei Times, adding that Taiwan may become more cautious in its dealings with South Korea going forward. Taipei has called on Seoul to correct its electronic entry system, which currently lists Taiwan as “China (Taiwan),” warning that reciprocal measures may follow if the wording is not changed before March 31. As of yesterday,
The Portuguese never established a presence on Taiwan, but they must have traded with the indigenous people because later traders reported that the locals referred to parts of deer using Portuguese words. What goods might the Portuguese have offered their indigenous trade partners? Among them must have been slaves, for the Portuguese dealt slaves across Asia. Though we often speak of “Portuguese” ships, imagining them as picturesque vessels manned by pointy-bearded Iberians, in Asia Portuguese shipping between local destinations was crewed by Asian seamen, with a handful of white or Eurasian officers. “Even the great carracks of 1,000-2,000 tons which plied
It’s only half the size of its more famous counterpart in Taipei, but the Botanical Garden of the National Museum of Nature Science (NMNS, 國立自然科學博物館植物園) is surely one of urban Taiwan’s most inviting green spaces. Covering 4.5 hectares immediately northeast of the government-run museum in Taichung’s North District (北區), the garden features more than 700 plant species, many of which are labeled in Chinese but not in English. Since its establishment in 1999, the site’s managers have done their best to replicate a number of native ecosystems, dividing the site into eight areas. The name of the Coral Atoll Zone might
Nuclear power is getting a second look in Southeast Asia as countries prepare to meet surging energy demand as they vie for artificial intelligence-focused data centers. Several Southeast Asian nations are reviving mothballed nuclear plans and setting ambitious targets and nearly half of the region could, if they pursue those goals, have nuclear energy in the 2030s. Even countries without current plans have signaled their interest. Southeast Asia has never produced a single watt of nuclear energy, despite long-held atomic ambitions. But that may soon change as pressure mounts to reduce emissions that contribute to climate change, while meeting growing power needs. The
RSS