Divorcees Juggle Kids and Career in One Fine Day

Journalist Jack Taylor (George Clooney) and architect Melanie Parker (Michelle Pfeiffer) are divorced New Yorkers trying to juggle high-powered careers and parenthood. Jack’s daughter Maggie (Mae Whitman) and Melanie’s son Sammy (Alex D. Linz) are kindergarten classmates. After a carpooling attempt gone bad causes them to miss their field trip, their parents have to spend all day trying to figure out what to do with them in the 1996 rom-com One Fine Day.

This is one of those movies that I’ve stumbled upon multiple times while channel surfing, and I finally decided to watch it from the beginning recently when it came up for Instant Viewing on Netflix. This PG-rated movie is part romance, part parent-child bonding film. Jack and Melanie have never met before this day, but they immediately clash as his lackadaisical tendencies set the day’s chaotic events into motion. Jack does not have primary custody, and although he loves his little girl, he finds it hard to be bothered with the minutiae of looking after her when his ex-wife drops her at his door unexpectedly. Control freak Melanie is the primary parent, but her focus on her career is so intense that Sammy sometimes gets left in the lurch. Both of them are extremely distracted, which causes problems for them as they try to pull off career-saving moves while keeping their kids busy.

Sammy and Maggie are both adorable and aggravating. While his primary problem is a propensity for putting objects in his nose, hers is wandering off quietly so that no one realizes until moments later that she has disappeared. Both are sweet-natured but oblivious to the trouble they are causing with their fidgety actions. Some of the mischief they get into is funny, while at other times it’s cringe-inducing. This is a big, dangerous city, after all, and both Jack and Melanie, who alternate supervising the kids, have a very difficult time keeping a close eye on them. Several scenarios would really be pretty alarming if they occurred in real life.

Of course, part of the development of the characters over the course of this single day is the adults realizing they need to be more attentive and, to a lesser extent, the kids realizing they need to stop running wild. The lesson doesn’t sink in so much with the children, but I would say there’s a least a hint that they will make more of an effort in the future. Then, of course, there’s Jack and Melanie, and while they mostly meet each other briefly before going their separate ways, they gradually get to know each other and begin to understand that their initial distaste for each other may have been misplaced.

In the midst of this jam-packed day, we see the four of them interact with a variety of people as Jack tries to find a key witness to back up something he printed in the paper and Melanie attempts to sell her latest design to a high-powered bidder. These brief interactions are fun, and I especially liked Charles Durning as Jack’s irascible boss and Ellen Greene as his key witness. However, this movie is mostly about the kids and their parents and how their being thrown together leads them to a better understanding of themselves and the possibility of more meetings to come. Epic romance this is not, but it is a cute movie showing that sometimes, a single day can tell two people quite a lot about each other.

Hairspray Exuberantly Examines the Notion of Otherness

I've been hearing a lot about Hairspray over the last couple years thanks to the enthusiasm of my young cousins, who were such fans of the show that they went to see it on Broadway. Aside from hearing the effervescent opening number, Good Morning, Baltimore - a grand hello to a bustling city that reminds me a lot of our beautifully boisterous introduction to Belle and her little town in Beauty and the Beast - on late-night and early-morning television, in the Macy's Parade and on Ugly Betty, I was pretty unfamiliar with the play, but all the buzz about it was enough to get me pretty pumped up for the movie when I heard that director Adam Shankman would be bringing it to the big screen.

Yesterday, my parents, my friend Libbie and I decided to see for ourselves what all the hype was about. What we got was a joyous kaleidoscope of slightly over-the-top early-sixties eye candy, with the darker edges of that era bubbling beneath the surface until they are brought into the full light of scrutiny when Queen Latifah's matronly Motormouth Maybelle leads a soulful march protesting the segregationist policies of The Corny Collins Show, the American Bandstand-esque television program that turns Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky), a starry-eyed teen with a heart as oversized as her pudgy frame, into an overnight sensation.

Blonsky is absolutely infectious in the lead role. The girl is a ray of sunshine, undeterred by all the obstacles that stand in the way of her dream of dancing on her favorite TV show, while also unwilling to compromise her principles for the sake of her ambition. As the film progresses, she becomes acutely aware of how the black students from whom she learns her best dance moves are oppressed, and she yearns to create an environment in which race need no longer be a barrier to opportunities. Just as she has broken down conventional societal expectations of beauty, she strives to show everyone that integration is the wave of the future.

Along the way, she dances her heart out and takes a few time-outs to sigh dreamily over Ricky Nelson-esque Link Larkin (Zac Efron), who gradually comes to see Tracy as a young woman of such substance that she overshadows his perfectly coiffed girlfriend Amber Von Tussle (Brittany Snow), whose conniving mother (Michelle Pfeiffer), the manager of the station on which the dance show airs, undermines the new girl every step of the way despite opposition from host Corny (James Marsden), whose dazzling smile gleams all the brighter whenever Tracy takes to the stage.

Her best friend Penny Pingleton (Amanda Bynes), a wisp of a girl with an omnipresent lollipop, ducks out from under the icy repression of her puritanical mother Prudy (Allison Janney) when she falls head over heels for Maybelle's exuberant son Seaweed (Elijah Kelley). Tracy, meanwhile, aims to bring her mother Edna (John Travolta), a frumpy laundress whose crippling self-image has long led her to eschew the outside world, into contemporary society. She's not an unreasonable woman; she's just insecure and set in her ways, and with a little nudging she is ready to support her daughter in her endeavors, though perhaps not as whole-heartedly as Tracy's gentle, eccentric father Wilbur (Christopher Walken), who achieved his own long-held goal when he opened a novelty shop, which enjoys an upsurge in business in the wake of Tracy's newfound celebrity.

Much was made of Travolta's gender-bending performance here, and he certainly immersed himself in the part, though I was never quite able to forget that she was actually a he, and neither was the rest of the audience, judging by the nervous titters that rippled whenever Walken edged in for a kiss. After his over-the-top performance in High School Musical, I wasn't sure what I would think of Efron, but he was much more nuanced here, even though he was in a similar role as a dreamboat who is startled into self-awareness by the arrival of an unconventional gal. I didn't think there was a weak link in the cast, and I give special kudos to Janney for making such a simultaneously humorous and terrifying impression in her brief appearances.

As someone with limited familiarity with the songs in this film, I was impressed by their energy and complexity. The lyrics in particular are very clever, perfectly capturing the various speech patterns of characters and often riddled with sly innuendoes that indicate this was not such an innocent time after all. Most of these are subtle enough that they would probably go right over the heads of youngsters, and there's little else in the movie that could be considered objectionable. Indeed, Hairspray is an ideal film for the family to see together, as the bouncy dance numbers and likable characters reel audiences in for a poignant lesson in the importance of accepting other people's differences. Don't miss out!