Friday, January 11, 2008

The Long Kiss Goodnight

I feel like the main issue that we’re going to have with this film during the discussion is class is going to be about whether or not it qualifies as a buddy cop film. It’s true that neither of the min characters, the buddy “cops”, are actually cops. From reading other people’s blogs it seems to me that this is the main issue that people have with fitting The Long Kiss Goodnight into the buddy cop film genre. My response to this is that I’m not sure that you have to be a police officer to qualify as a cop in the movies. I mean, there are plenty of movies that advertise themselves as a classic cop action movie when they hinge on a character in some sort of government role (like the FBI, or in this case the CIA). We also have various cop movies where one of the characters is a PI. I tend to see these movies as a little more believable based purely on the fact that if the character is not actually a cop, as an audience member, I’m more likely to excuse the unprofessional and uncoplike strategies and procedures.

As for whether this film is a buddy cop movie or not, I’m not sure. We seem to have quite a few of those elements present here. It appears that what we have here is another one of those films that was trying to redefine the genre. They include the classic scenes and characteristics—argument, bonding, action packed gunfights and explosions, a white villain, and a ransom figure. Although the film definitely takes a turn away from King based merely on the fact that the hero is a woman. I think that previous posters were right about how this was probably handled by the director by making Geena Davis appear more masculine.

As for race and gender in the film, I feel almost like race wasn’t mentioned at all. I think that the main focus, instead, was on Geena Davis’s gender. Especially because Mitch had previously associated her with a muffin baking schoolteacher, he seems to bring up her gender repeatedly until she proves herself. Only then does her femininity stop being a hold up. Besides that she is portrayed as being a sexual object at times, rather than a strong character. I don’t like this, but I guess it’s one of the trade offs for having a female action star. On one note, I’d like to point out that she wasn’t the only one of our heroes to end up half naked while she was being tortured (a la Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon).

The last thing that I want to say is that I know why the call it The Long Kiss Goodnight, it’s because they allow it to drag on twenty minutes longer than they should have. I was really enjoying the movie up until all of the craziness that was overdone at the end. I mean, seriously, how many characters are you going to have die and come back to life?

1 Comments:

Blogger Sweet Sweetback (DIrvin) said...

I want to hope that they made the move sort of goofy like that for a reason. The unlikely action hero in Geena David is funny. She's is fairly well known for playing empowering and masculine roles.roles. She's played a female baseball player before and even a female president, so its not surprise to me that they attempted to make her an action star as well. It appears to be a very corny movie after watching such movies as Training Day, Se7en and In the Heat of the Night. It ends up becoming humorous with Mitch's jokes and one liners. The fact that the enemy would not stay dead is just another action movie staple to throw in.

8:32 AM  

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