Jack Black's Hunkiness, and Why It's Hard to Fall in Love With Yourself (But Probably Easier if You're Kate Winslet)

This week I'm wrong about the romantic leads of a Nancy Meyers film, plus large lattes and a model for thinking about good movies

It is the holiday season, which makes it romcom season, which makes it time-to-question-and-nitpick-every-aspect-of-what-are-probably-just-supposed-to-be-fun-movies season.

This morning, while indulging my toxic addiction to twitter (I refuse to call it anything else), I stumbled on one of the most prominent annual debates of the season—why is Jack Black a romantic lead, and is he a good one, in Nancy Meyers’ Christmas classic The Holiday?

For those who haven’t seen it, The Holiday asks the age old question: what if Cameron Diaz was a wildly successful (like, living in a literal mansion she owns in her early 30s) LA career-woman who swapped houses for a week with an also-successful, English Kate Winslet who tragically can only afford a picturesque cottage in the countryside (and who is recovering from a doomed relationship with a horrible man). They both fall in love—Diaz with probably the most handsome man who vaguely shares my hairline to ever exist (Jude Law), and Winslet with the subject of today’s pointless twitter controversy (Jack Black). The holiday helps them overcome their personal issues that led to their inability to be happy at home (more on that later), and then presumably they live happily ever after. Nobody ever convinces Diaz that foreplay is actually great.

Two Men With the Same Hairline

Now, as far as I can trace the twitter debate about Jack Black, it started with this tweet that was part of a larger thread recapping the movie:

I discovered the controversy because I follow Bolu Babalola, a writer of multiple books, including a romantic comedy. I originally followed Babalola because she is the internet’s premier Nick Miller appreciator, but she’s also a very sharp and insightful critic, especially about romcoms both on screen and on the page.

Babalola defended Black’s credentials as a romantic lead, and I agree with everything she argues:

Babalola is pointing to his most romantic gesture (where he writes a melody representing Winslet using “only the good notes,” which is objectively a killer line), and the contrast his character provides to Jasper (the scumbag played by the platonic ideal of a British villain, Rufus Sewell), as well as the fact that Black is just a charming character who doesn’t happen to look like most Hollywood heartthrobs. I saw another tweet that argued the controversy is rooted in fatphobia, which is also probably right.

But as someone who loves Jack Black in pretty much everything, and does think he was charming and believable as a romantic interest for Winslet, and who thinks a lot of the criticism is from people being wrong about his viability in the role—I also wish he wasn’t in the movie.

I actually wish his character didn’t even exist.

(I have been thinking a lot about romcoms for the past 8+ months because I’ve been taking screenwriting workshops with Alanna Bennett and Hope Rehak. They’re both amazing writers and you should check out their work, especially Hope’s substack.)

At the beginning of the movie, Winslet’s character, Iris, is trapped in a toxic situationship with the previously mentioned Jasper, and is completely unable to see herself as worthy of love, especially self-love. She actually attempts to commit suicide at the start of the movie! Which is something I forgot happened until recently, and is shocking they included (and glossed over) in such an otherwise lighthearted movie.

She is a woman in desperate need of self-validation, of understanding her own worthiness and value, and is absolutely not ready to be in a committed romantic relationship with anyone. And when she arrives in LA, she almost immediately finds the perfect man to help her achieve that understanding.

It’s this guy:

Adorable

Arthur, played by Eli Wallach, is a widower and retired screenwriter who Iris befriends. He is a Hollywood legend who has devolved into self-pity, thinking nobody cares about him or his work anymore.

The two characters do what good friends do best—they validate the shit out of each other. Iris is impressed by Arthur’s accomplishments and helps him reconnect with old friends, and convinces him to attend a ceremony in his honor, and even volunteers to be his personal trainer so he can confidently climb the stairs to the podium at that event. Arthur recognizes that Iris is a brilliant, thoughtful, beautiful woman—and he spends the entire movie telling her how amazing she is. Both characters are the linchpins in the others’ journey to recognizing that they are, actually, pretty great.

And that SHOULD be Iris’s journey! She is smart and kind and worthy of praise and adoration, and she should BELIEVE that herself! Black’s character, a composer, also recognizes those things as they become friends—but he isn’t the reason SHE believes them. Arthur is.

I reject wholeheartedly that romance is necessary for meaningful, life-changing connection¹. Iris’s entire problem is that she is basing her self-worth on the way her prior romantic interest treats her. Her breakthrough in the film is not when she realizes she’s interested in a new romance, but when she recognizes how her old one with Jasper doesn’t serve her needs and is in fact beneath her.

Arthur is a FRIEND who values and respects and adores Iris, and they both help each other achieve a loving relationship with themselves so they can move on with their lives to new, wonderful things. That is an epic story! That is beautiful! That is more than one movie, let alone half of a movie, could ever hope to meaningfully and fully portray!

Jack Black is a great romantic lead. And his presence is a distraction from Iris’s more important, and honestly somewhat radical, character arc. I think at least part (the better part) of the controversy around his character is a misattribution of why he feels unsatisfying within the film—it’s because he’s redundant to Iris’s personal journey that is more fully and more effectively captured within her new friendship. The Holiday, and honestly more movies generally, should have the courage to let characters have an epic love story with their friends and with themselves.

Saltburn and What Makes a Good Movie

I almost focused this week’s post on Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s new movie starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, and Rosamund Pike, among others. I saw it last week and left the theater speaking gibberish, made incomprehensible by what I saw. Specific images have been sticking in my head, and I have been replaying whole sections of the film to myself as I try to make sense of them. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the film’s combination of harsh, often cruel social observation and grotesque but compelling eroticism were unlike anything I’d seen before—and while most of the larger plot points felt obvious to me, there is one twist that completely took me by surprise. My reaction made me think it might be something something worth writing about.

Then I realized I have nothing to say, and I honestly can’t tell if it’s because I didn’t fully understand the movie, or because it wasn’t made for me, or for some other reason. Other, smarter people have said a lot about the film, but I’ve been thinking about it non-stop for a week and still have no intelligent thoughts.

But it did make me think about how we classify movies, and I have a loose framework to propose: we should think about movies as effective (or not), as morally good (or not), and as entertaining (or not). I think movies can be one of these things and not the others, and many films are intentionally only one or two of these things, and obviously there is overlap between them—but I do think the worthiness of a film can be evaluated on these criteria. I think the artistic worthiness of a film can be measured by how it wants to be these things versus how it is.

Effective: by this I mean, does it make you feel something. A movie that makes you laugh or cry is effective. A movie that makes you angry is also effective. You might not enjoy it, and it might not be positive, but you felt something. Fantasia is an effective movie. So is something like Borat (anything controversial is probably effective). It’s hard to think of examples of ineffective movies because they’re not memorable, but a good example might be The Rise of Skywalker—a franchise film so safe, so cowardly in it’s messaging, it didn’t do anything. Saltburn was absolutely effective—the theater audibly gasped and reacted throughout the entire film.

Morally Good: A film is morally good if it advocates for moral values (which is different than depicting them). Morality is obviously subjective, so this would depend on what you consider good. I would argue Oppenheimer, despite being about people doing a terrible thing, is a morally good movie, because its argument is that we shouldn’t use science to massacre and commit genocide. Many violent movies are morally good (like my favorite film, Mad Max: Fury Road), although many are morally repugnant in advocating for violence as a weapon of the state or to repress alternative ideas (even otherwise good cop movies are often copaganda—I love Demolition Man, but it’s not a morally good movie). Romcoms are often morally good (When Harry Met Sally is an argument for caring about friendship and human connection before sex), but others are not when they argue women should give up on their dreams to be with a man (the end of Friends does this to Rachel). I truly have no clue what the moral argument of Saltburn was, and that’s probably why I can’t articulate meaningful thoughts on it.

Entertaining: this is the most intuitive category, in that it pretty much asks if you had fun watching it. A film can be entertaining but not effective (most Marvel movies), and it can be effective and moral without being entertaining (Spotlight is a good example here—a movie making an important point about accountability of institutions very well and creating a lot of emotion, but objectively a tough movie to watch). But a movie can be entertaining and effective (I return to Mad Max, or When Harry Met Sally). Saltburn was intermittently entertaining for me, and at other points I was wildly uncomfortable. That was probably its intention.

I’d love to hear where your favorite movies fall in this framework!

Finally, A Large Latte

I recently realized that at about half the coffee shops I go to, a “large” latte is the same number of espresso shots as a small. Meaning, they just pour more milk on top of the same amount of coffee and charge you an extra dollar-fifty for it.

Well, I am appalled. Disgusted. Outraged! I order coffee for coffee, and when I say large I mean MORE. I demand MORE coffee, not over-presentation of it! I want to be shaking from stimulation! I want to spend three hours hyper-focusing on my rapid rating on chess.com! I want to suddenly realize I’m no longer at the coffee shop, and am in fact singing show tunes at the top of my lungs while walking down Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue!

To all establishments who perpetuate this fraud—I will find you out, and your punishment will be severe (I will order a small). Let this be a warning!

In related news, I ordered my large coffees today with an extra shot of espresso.

1. Spoiler alert, this is the premise of the screenplay I’m working on.