Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Romantic Comedy #7 - Adam's Rib (1949)

Adam's Rib is frustrating to me. It's a Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn movie, so it should be fun. It should be charming. It should be funny. It is not. It's about women's rights and gender roles in marriages - They're a married couple of lawyers who take opposite sides of the same case - and it's not fun to watch. This movie is exhausting - I'm still not sure who they want us to agree with. Spencer Tracy is right about the law, but Katherine Hepburn is just doing her job as a lawyer. Of course she's going to try to win. I have a concerning suspicion that I disagree with the conclusions that this movie makes, which is never a good time.

It's not even funny, either. I don't remember any specific jokes from it at all. It was just this boring gray movie about an argument that I didn't want to see a movie about. This movie has not aged well for me: The issue is whether or not women should be treated equally under the law - they actually debate this - and whether the "Unwritten Rule," about being able to kill your spouse's lover, is just. These are not compelling issues for me here in 2012. The answers are yes and no. There, I solved it. I did not need to devote 90 minutes to that. And, on top of all this, the poster is the November page of my calender right now. Thanks calender, mock me why don't you?

Cool fact about it, though: The woman who wrote the script played Maude in Harold and Maude. So there's that I guess.

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