this is stuff you like you can call me Ursa and makeovers are great but they do
have a dark side. Miss Congeniality 2 is not a better film than its predecessor
but I like it better. It's first of all an odd couple cop movie, second of all a
Mean Girls becoming the mask makeover narrative - with that whole fear of losing
yourself thing that I'm a big fan of but we'll come back to that in a minute -
and third of all about friendship and loyalty and trust and all that good
stuff. And like I said it's not as good a movie. Why? Well first, no Michael Caine
which is a big shame no Candace Bergen as the pageant director / criminal
mastermind and William Shatner finds himself rather underused. "This is Stan
Fields and and she's too young to die and I'm not as old as I look!"
there are still funny lines but there are fewer of them and the film is being
carried on fewer shoulders and so it falls flat just that much more often. "I'd
be happy to say it if you like! I've done quite a bit of theatre!" Also it's stupid
I make no bones about this Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous is
stupid, at least as stupid as is predecessor. "I am NOT going out there as a woman
pretending to be a man pretending to be Tina Turner! I can't afford therapy on
my salary!" But with a title like Armed and Fabulous should you really be expecting
anything else? The plot runs thusly Grace Hart is finding being an FBI agent
and particularly going undercover is impossible now that her face has been all over prime time. She
gets offered a job as the face of the FB (PR! Makeup! Hair! Shoes! Chat
shows!) but she turns it down until her boyfriend - yeah remember him? - dumps her by
phone "is it the way I snort ...because I don't have to snort..."
she takes the job at least partially to get over the heartbreak and gets a
little too into the whole makeover thing, because remember people care about
people who care about themselves. Agent Sam Fuller is her bodyguard and also
cranky they don't get on then Cheryl (remember her?) and Stan (I know you
remember him) get kidnapped, the guy in charge of the investigation is a douche
canoe and Grace finds herself dressed in drag on a Vegas stage or something.
she and Sam have an Odd Couple learning to get along plot arc Cheryl takes
initiative some minor characters do some stuff and there is little to no romance.
If I had to sum up the plot I would offer the phrase insane yet utterly
predictable. Also there are jokes about menstruation because apparently men find
periods completely incomprehensible "you heard her we got an agent down we need
tampons! oh my God. I don't even do it for my wife
it's not that I don't appreciate that people are trying to make jokes about
bleeding from one's uterus, because you know, if you can't laugh... but of all the
stupid ridiculous disbelief-suspending things in this film this was the one
that made me go really? Really? "tampons" anyway the whole chick flick genre is
one to which much is ascribed: stereotyping of women, restricting the
ambitions of their female characters to 'snag a man' and not much beyond that,
restrictive standards of beauty, causing the fall of civilization as we know it,
you know all that sort of thing. And yes a lot of mainstream films for women
about women having to do mainly with women have a significant love interest
plot but I like how this one doesn't though it is partially about those
expectations. Instead of finding solace in drinking or Ben and Jerry's after
being dumped Grace resolves to make herself into the perfect FBI pageant
type girl for realsies and keepsies this time because that's what men want right?
This is the dark side of the makeover narrative and the tone is light but the
implications they are heavy: erase your past self be assimilated
while the absolution narrative has atonement for and forgiveness all of all
of the bad things you've done "I got red in my ledger I'd like to wipe it out" in
the makeover narrative we just erase everything about you. The extreme
makeover story is about forgetting all you have been in favor of the
contradictory hivemind of societal expectations. Every day people are told
that they're not enough in some way they're not young enough, they're not old
enough, they're not pretty enough, they're not curvy enough, they're not muscular
enough, they're not thin enough Charlotte Andersen (her blog is awesome by the way
you should go read it) put it like this "before we even learn words like glass
ceiling we learn two irreconcilable facts: one, that beauty is our currency
and two, that we will never be beautiful enough. And every girl and let's face it,
many boys too, then has to decide how to make sense out of this nonsense. I was
reminded of this the other day during a conversation with the woman whose job is
in the beauty industry. As she was detailing to me all the various services
available I interrupted her to ask "do you ever just stop someone and say you
know what you're good now you don't need anything else"
she looked surprised and then answered "well nobody's perfect there's always
something else that can be done." I replied "that is the saddest thing I've
ever heard" well I know that she was looking at it
purely from an industry standpoint and probably didn't mean it to be this meta
it still struck me as sad that you could get every treatment that money could buy
and you still wouldn't be beautiful enough." Grace is no longer the klutzy
ugly duckling pretending to be the ideal in the sequel she's completely
suppressed her own personality to become the perfect woman or employee or
whatever but however perfect she appears it doesn't make her happy and it isn't
who she is in all transformations of this nature
there is the danger of losing yourself. at least in the Pygmalion myth you start
with a block of marble. When you start with an actual person... Real people are
worth more. But when the focus is on living up to someone else's standards of
how you should be rather than being the best possible version of you then you
end up with indistinguishable drones, you end up with slaves to the beauty myth,
always fruitlessly striving to be enough but never reaching it. With the help of
her friends grace manages to strike a balance between wanting to look good and
wanting to kick ass. "Straining muscles, cutting off someone's air supply...
you're right I feel like a woman again" you can have shiny hair and be a
feminist yay but crucially you don't have to have shiny hair to be a feminist.
In fact Grace's self-induced makeover turned frontal lobotomy is the reason she
and Sam Fuller don't get on, the impetus for the odd couple esque plotline. Both are
or were brash impetuous hotheads who aren't really that good at following
orders. Grace has turned into a diva (in the impossibly demanding sense of the
word) and she really gets Sam's back up "you didn't just call me sister!" "That's not what
she meant" "because I don't recall seeing a little skinny ass white girl at the
table growing up!" and for her part Sam is as judge about Grace as Grace was about
the pageant girls in the original also Sam's kind of indiscriminately aggressive...
she's just bad at relationships and teamwork and people. And so her character
arc is about learning to be better at all of those things. Sam and Grace learn
and grow and change and discover each other's strengths and they deal with some of
Grace's issues too "and to feel your heart ripped open
because you finally took a chance on that relationship and it wound up
confirming all your worst fears, that you are worthless and not worth caring about"
I really genuinely like how they handle that because in spite of what a small
but fervent section of the interwebs would have you believe it is possible to
be really good friends and good partners without necessarily needing to jump each
other bones or even wanting to. There are of course plenty of examples of
partnerships you always seem three steps away from snogging in a broom cupboard
say Ziva and Tony but you don't have to have that to have a good partnership
you can work just as well when you're strictly platonic heterosexual life
partners. I get the impression that Grace and Sam really like each other
underneath all the snark and the banter "You're my new partner you have
to like me and... back me up if someone's shooting at me" "not necessarily"
"hmm" like I said it's not really that good of a movie but I still like it and
that's why
next time well next time the Avengers Assemble on DVD I'm gonna go get my
squee on. [Avengers theme]