Tag Archives: Katharine Hepburn

Bringing Up Baby Review

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It’s time to look at another crazy comedy with Grant at the helm. It’s a bit weaker than his other ones mainly due to how slow on the uptake the main character is and the heroine not being very likable but it does still have that crazy charm which keeps it in the green. If you’re up for a lot of madness and watching a guy wreck his life throughout all of this, you’ll need to check this one out.

The movie starts with David working on a giant dinosaur. His life has been going pretty well lately. He is slated to finally marry his fiancé tomorrow and the final bone for the skeleton arrived after 4 years of excavating. Now the only thing left to do is to convince the rich millionaire’s lawyer to donate another 1 million dollars to the museum and everything will be peachy. There is just one obstacle in his path, a lady named Susan.

Susan shows up while David is golfing with Mr. Peabody (the Lawyer) and steals his ball. David chases her down but then she steals his car as well. She keeps on messing with him to great effect and it’s looking more and more like the guy doesn’t have any real chance left for the grant. Can David make a comeback or should he escape now while he still can? The longer he hangs out with this girl the more likely he is to keep on ruining his life.

I should also mention that we have a tiger running around and a dog who loves to bark at everything. David was already not very good at trying to finish a conversation and now he really has no shot. While he can be a fun lead, it’s hard to sympathize with him all that
Much because he makes a mistake on just about everything he does. A whole lot of his problems would have been solved if he had explained things better or taken charge. Instead he often finds himself wrapped in the craziness and unable to get back out. He should have went back to resume the golf game once he got his ball back and sued for damages on the car afterwards. Even right through the film’s ending you can’t help but feel like things did not go very well for him. The ending also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense with him hiding even though right after he acts like he’s happy that this is happening. Maybe he did go crazy by the end. I don’t really think he knows what he is getting into here.

As for Susan, I didn’t care for her either. Here’s the deal, you can be a bit of an oblivious character who gets in people’s way and stay likable. There are a lot of solid characters like that. The issue is that she is a little too over the top with how she misinterprets things. In the second half of the film she is intentionally sabotaging David so that she can pair up with him but in the first half there is no indication of this. She really thinks she is in the right car and that the golf ball is hers. It can be tough to take these scenes at face value because it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Either way her doubling down on all of this doesn’t help matters either. She wouldn’t even let David try to explain what was really going on. Of course this is for humor but it doesn’t land as well as it could have. Had she been an antagonistic character messing with him from the start I dare say it would have worked a little better.

It’s fun to see the little dog and leopard running around. I’m not actually a big fan of having real animals in film since you hear all the stories of them not being treated very well back in the day. The scene with the two of them fighting definitely didn’t seem very pleasant. Since I’ll never know one way or the other I’ll at least try to assume that it was okay on the back-end though. Gotta focus on the on-screen action. For the story plot, it was nice to have the dog troll the main characters in the backyard for a while. Digging’s a pretty fun sport even if my Sonic never does a whole lot of this.

We’ve also got some supporting characters thrown in near the end once David is taken to Susan’s aunt’s place for dinner. We meet a big game hunter who tries his best to make friends with the others. He was a pretty reasonable character. His animal calls were on point even if he ended up getting trolled a lot. The drunk guy was definitely out of his league here though. Having all of these characters around did help for the prison scene later on which is probably the highlight of the film. The cops show up to start dishing out arrests and manage to nab almost the whole main cast. You also can’t blame them here because the heroes were acting awfully suspicious. It gives us some back and forth and these were humor scenes that really landed. All of the scenes during the prison subplot were excellent and I wouldn’t have minded spending more time there to be honest. It was a nice change of scenery and really made the main characters focus.

As for the main plot about getting the funding, if I were the aunt I certainly wouldn’t give David the money after all that. Are you kidding me? He wouldn’t get a dime! While the circumstances did attribute to how crazy David got near the end, you can’t get past the first impression. It’s not one she would be likely to forget and then you have the rock getting thrown at Mr. Peabody and actually landing. David doesn’t even refute the charge since at this point he’s long since given up. Since nobody actually clears up the misunderstanding, most of the characters here must not have a particularly high opinion of David here.

Overall, Bringing Up Baby is a fun film that maybe overstays its welcome a bit. It probably could have been a been shorter and they would have kept the film more focused with solid jokes layered into it. The main two characters aren’t nearly as solid as some other other duos in films like this. Still, there are enough fun scenes here to keep your attention and throwing in the dinosaur bone was a good plot device. It’s the kind of film that has some solid replay value built into it with how quickly things happen. You more or less know how things are going to go down so it’s about the experience along the way. Although, I was expecting a twist where Susan was the lady giving the money away so the film threw me a curveball there. I’d recommend checking it out if this sounds like it’s up your alley.

Overall 6/10

Woman of the Year Review

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I’m glad that the poster mentioned how this isn’t suitable for general viewing because it really isn’t. Yes, I’m talking about the content. It’s not violence or fanservice, but just a bad message that the film churns out which basically says that the heroine tried to step out of her designated gender line and so she was in the wrong. Lets delve into this film a little more, but it all feels like some kind of big scam considering that the title suggests that this will be a very empowering film.

The film starts off with a reporter drinking away his sorrows at a bar. He’s your stereotypical American. Sam like sports, has an over inflated ego, and drinks constantly. He hears a coworker by the name of Tess on the radio who says that sports are basically pointless and she wouldn’t mind if they were banned. He gets incredibly triggered and starts yelling a lot as everyone gently kicks him out of the bar. He writes a quick editorial back at her and the wars start. She’s completely destroying him in these written arguments and the boss begins to worry that it’s getting too personal. He tells them to knock it off and Sam realizes that he’ll have to “win” some other way. He invites Tess to a baseball game and they almost immediately decide to get married. Phase 1 of Sam’s plan is complete…time for phase 2!

Sam wants Tess to stop overshadowing him and making him feel bad. While they are co-workers in the magazine, they are on different levels. Sam writes pieces on sports and nobody really cares about him. Tess has connections within the army and ties to foreign ambassadors and people of very high stature. She speaks dozens of languages and is also rich and known as one of the most charitable individuals in the world. Sam is jealous and I suspect that he has been for some time now. He wants her to be a normal housewife or he’s going to embarrass her socially. He decides to skip out on her father’s wedding because he’s a jerk like that and does his best to destroy her legacy as such a pioneer for women’s rights. Can he succeed?

Short answer: Yes. Long Answer: He causes a lot of damage and does undermine her efforts at every turn. Towards the end of the film, Tess starts to get over dramatic to make Sam look good in comparison but it’s far, far too late. While the film doesn’t necessarily say this either, the whole thing seems like a plan of Sam’s from the beginning. I feel like he only married her so that he could try to get her to retire from being super successful and then he can finally feel superior. The whole thing felt like a way to put her down and the film never made this out to be a bad thing.

On the contrary, most of the climax is about Tess trying to make him a breakfast. Plot twist! Despite Tess being a super genius she has never been inside of a kitchen before. She doesn’t know how to make Toast or how to crack an egg. You’ve gotta be kidding right? That’s such an exaggeration and there is no way that she wouldn’t be able to do these things. I was getting triggered myself during the scenes as Sam is still being petty the whole time. He just sits there making mean facial expressions and mocking her efforts the whole time. She shouldn’t even have to be making it up to him since he was in the wrong the whole time.

Lets backtrack a bit though. When they first went out to the baseball game, Tess made an effort to learn it. Learning a sport and all the positions can be pretty tough if you’re not familiar with it, but she used her analytical experience from solving foreign matters of great delicacy and did it. She was then able to really get into the game and have a good time. Next, she invited him to one of her diplomatic meetings. Sam quickly found out that nobody there spoke English so he took the chance to make fun of someone since the guy couldn’t understand him and then Sam dashed out. He gets pretty full of himself from then on and tries to visit Tess in her office without talking to her secretary. Why would he be allowed in without an appointment? He has absolutely no respect for her position or duties and seems to think that he should be given priority over all of them. “Drop your appointment with the Prime Minister…I want to go to McDonalds tonight!” is essentially his attitude.

The only real mistake Tess made was to try manipulating Sam. She made him breakfast in bed for the first time and started talking about having a kid out of the blue. Sam was thrilled about this since having a kid would in theory mean that Tess would be focusing on her job next. She then lays the atom bomb on him by walking in a fully grown kid that she adopted from an unsafe environment. The kid’s a refuge. Sam’s immediately apprehensive, but you can be sympathetic to him. It’s like waking up on Christmas and your parents saying, “Remember that Nintendo Switch bundle that just came out with Mario Odyssey?” Me: Yeah! Them: “Well, we got you a Nintendo 64 and a used copy of Superman 64” Me: “Nooooooo!”

Superman 64 is actually a good game and adopting a kid is a really nice thing to do. They can easily turn his life from a very tragic one into a blessed one. The problem is that it’s not fair to just push this onto someone with no warning and even more so when you bring their hopes up only to smash it down. The kid can’t speak English either which makes the situation worse and the whole thing is unfair to Sam. This is the one part of the film where I don’t blame him for being upset and returning the kid to the orphanage was the right thing to do. The pair couldn’t handle the kid, but none of them really had a discussion with the other. This was also a pretty tricky moment since he did it as she was supposed to accept her Woman of the Year award. He naturally decided not to attend either although to his defense again, she claimed that he had no life so he should come. That’s kind of a mean thing to say.

You can tell by this point that the film was now trying to make her so exaggeratedly mean and insincere that we’re supposed to root for Sam. The problem is that I’d never do so in a million years. You really have to watch the film to see what a terrible character he is. At the very least, he does believe in getting even and tries to do so every time he is slighted.

It’s a shame that the film had to die in the writing department/plot because it could have been good otherwise. It’s part comedy and the humor is handled rather well. I liked one of Sam’s friends who is always talking about how well he fights. The guy came through when it counted and I always like the genuine friends like that who enjoy a good beer but are around when it counts. The scenes of Sam getting embarrassed are also pretty fun as you’d expect. It’s just all for naught in the end…such is the power of a bad ending.

Overall, I’m clearly not impartial in this film. I was on Team Tess the whole time. If you were rooting for Sam then I imagine that you would probably like this film quite a lot as he gets the last laugh time and time again. I never like seeing someone running around trying to please the other when it’s the mean character’s fault in the first place. It’s just unsavory and brings this film down quite a lot. I recommend avoiding it like an old Cheese stick and just watching something a little classier like The Magic School Bus. At least that show is educational and always leaves you with a heartfelt message.

Overall 3/10