In Long Shot, Seth Rogan’s goofy loser bags the refined Charlize Theron, following in the footsteps of too many romantic comedies
Long Shot stretches the romcom concept of “opposites attract” to breaking point. In one corner we have Charlize Theron: smart, beautiful, powerful, cultivated. In the other, Seth Rogen, in a teal cagoule. She is US secretary of state; he is an unemployed journalist. What can he possibly bring to the party? They meet at a glitzy Manhattan fundraiser, to which Rogen rocks up in his cagoule, then falls down a flight of stairs. But still she employs him as her speechwriter and romance inexplicably kindles. He doesn’t even change out of the cagoule until halfway through the film, when one of Theron’s aides asks if he has any “grownup clothes”.
This glaring mismatch is the whole point of Long Shot, of course. It is supposedly an up-to-date gender reversal of that tired old fairytale whereby female beauty meets male wealth and they happily affirm the patriarchy ever after. Long Shot knowingly references 1990’s Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere’s (equally questionable) take on the old Cinderella/Pygmalion formula but, despite being very funny, it doesn’t really stack up as a mirror image.
Continue reading...from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2VASUqx
Comments
Post a Comment