When comedians decide to “do drama”, you can hear their managers
slapping themselves violently on the forehead.
“Sweetheart (even if it’s a guy), are you sure you want to
do this?” (Delicately expressed so as
not to get fired as manager, whose primary job requirement is persuasiveness,
starting with persuading them they need a manager in the first place.)
To quote the wise words from The Three Amigos concerning the deleterious consequences of giving
the audience what it didn’t ask for instead of what it’s expecting:
“We strayed from the
formula and we paid the price.”
This show biz dictum is substantiated by box office evidence
comparing the last two Tina Fey movies, the former a comedy, the latter, a
“dramedy” with an emphasis on the “dram”:
Sisters – one
hundred and four million dollars in ticket sales.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
– fourteen.
Okay, so let’s personalize this, using myself as an audience
member, positively disposed to Tina Fey’s intelligence, taste and comedic sensibility. I do not always love what she does, but I
respect her artistic integrity. And
sometimes I laugh.
I was not entirely exhilarated by the prospect of seeing
this movie. But when your alternatives
are seeing Whisky Tango Foxtrot or
staying home and watching an episode of Father
Brown you have already seen and had not liked the first time, you put on
your pants and you go.
(Acknowledgement:
I do not always wear pants in the house.
So if you drop by unexpectedly, expect a short delay after ringing the
doorbell.)
The movie starts. A
TV journalist with a waning enthusiasm for the job accepts the challenge of
being a “field reporter” in war-ravaged Afghanistan.
Okay. Private Benjamin. ‘Fish out of water.’ Here we go.
No. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot – which I am
guessing is a militarized acronym for “What The Fuck!” though it is not spelled
out in the movie – has deeper and more serious intensions.
Okay, then it’s M*A*S*H?
No. The narrative is
not hallucinogenically induced and minimally, if at all, critical of the
military. (Although even The Princess Pride warned against
prolonged land wars in Asia.)
So I am watching this movie (based on a memoir by combat
journalist Kim Barker) and it is not long – I am no dummy – before I realize
that it is not going to be a comedy. (Although,
concerned about its commercial prospects, it has unquestionably been marketed
as one. Plus, there’s Tina Fey, who is virtually
synonymous with comedy. So there were
clues. They just happened to be wrong.)
I am then reminded of overhearing a Senior Citizen attending
Seth MacFarlane’s Ten Thousand Ways To
Die In The West in Michigan City Indiana believing she had bought tickets
to a comedy although not one involving graphically delineated sex acts
exclaiming,
“I don’t know about this.”
Okay, it’s not a comedy.
So what is it?
It is a sanitized depiction of a female correspondent in a
contemporary war zone,
altering my response to the movie at that point from a
mildly disappointed “It’s not a comedy” to an anxiety-riddled “Somebody’s getting their foot blown
off!” Turning my general demeanor from “tolerant” to “I want to go home!”
But then, while I endured my obligatory sentence, the movie started
to grow on me, and I was eventually won over. Whiskey
Tango Foxtrot is not what I expected. But after I got past that, it became, for me, a
scrappy puppy I felt driven to protect.
Tina Fey is virtually impossible to dislike, even when her
character is a jerk. Though I would
never equate Tina Fey’s determination to play a flawed character in a movie with
a combat journalist putting herself “in harm’s way”, I truly believe that both
actions, in their respective arenas, require demonstrable courage.
Also, as a valuable “take away”, I left the theater with a
line of dialogue that may prove helpful in dealing with the adversity headed
inevitably in my direction.
In a closing scene in the movie, the Tiny Fey character, now
stateside, visits a combat veteran whose loss of both legs in Afghanistan she
feels at least partially responsible for.
After dismissing a myriad of blameworthy suspects, the coping
double-amputee provides this simple philosophy:
“You embrace the ‘suck’ and you move on.”
Shimmering advice of that nature?
You would never hear that in a comedy.
2 comments:
Hi Earl, I followed your blog many years back and have to tell you (before you get too old and die...the Internet will ALWAYS be here). But I recently started what I consider to be a very relevant blog.
Point is, my writing has been entirely influenced by yours. You showed me how to draw the audience in and then do unexpected twists and turns...so THANK YOU EARL POMERANTZ (and wife and daughter).
chicagobred.blogspot.com
(the horror is all you as well ; )
Well, that was incredibly rude and thoughtless, Anon.
As I have no interest in Tina's latest movie, I did a little research on your Lexus. Well, not YOUR Lexus. Check out Autotrader. There are several '92 SC400s with fantastic mileage totals for sale, and way overpriced. But maybe the sellers can get those high prices in CA? Several models with mileage over 200K; one over 300K!
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