Movies Then and Now

I love old movies. I love new movies. Movies provide the perfect opportunity to look at other peoples' lives and sneer.
Yesterday, I watched a film from 1938 entitled Test Pilot. It was directed by Victor Fleming, about whom I have been reading in the most recent biography of his life, and it starred Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy, a glossy cast if ever there was one. I enjoyed the chemistry among the stars, but it was funny just how much our sensibilities as an audience have changed over the years.
Clark Gable is a, you guessed it, test pilot whose plane runs out of fuel right over Myrna Loy's farm, and he ends up making an emergency landing at 6:00 in the morning on her property. Out comes Myrna, fully made up, hair, face, dress, to flirt with our hero. They end up spending a day together during which Clark wins over her parents, takes her into Wichita for a ball game and a movie, and pretty much wraps her around his little finger. That Gable is a fast worker.
The next day, when Clark doesn't profess his undying love for Myrna, she ends up getting engaged to an old beau who lives nearby and rubbing it in Clark's face the night before he is scheduled to fly back. When he doesn't freak out and beg her to change her plans, she gets all emotional and ridiculous. After all, he did spend a day with her. What a cad.
Filmmakers would not get away with such insanity today. First of all, what did she expect? They have known each other 24 hours! I want to tell her, "Myrna, you get all dolled up by 6 in the am just in case some hot guy falls from the sky; and, when it happens, you get depressed if he doesn't whirl you away. Girl, you don't need Clark Gable. What you need is to get the hell off this farm! Plus, you're no spring chicken. You are clearly past 30. Aren't you tired of living with your folks? Get to the city. Heck, Wichita is only 20 miles away." I said these things to the TV, but, as usual, it did not affect the outcome. My favorite moment was Gable and Tracy attempting to buy a nightgown for Loy, and Gable struggling with the word "lingerie."
Then, last night, T and I went down to the Living Room Theatre for tapas and drinks and a movie. Our film selection was a little indie from the PNW entitled Humpday. This movie made me laugh a lot, and not for the same reasons I laughed at Myrna and Gable. Humpday is about two guys who are old college friends, one is now married, and they decide to enter an amateur porn festival by making a porn together. Yes, together! And they are straight. This idea is hatched, as so many are, during a night of drunken silliness. After sobering up, they decide it really is a very artistic idea and they should follow it through. They don't think about details like, oh, I don't know, flaccidity.
The hilarity ensues when the married guy has to explain this to his wife. The conversations between the characters in this movie are what had me LOLing. They are ridunculous. At one point, as the guys are in their hotel room prepping, they start trying to remember what exactly about this they thought was artistic.
I found the movie refreshingly honest and funny, and I highly recommend it. While I don't necessarily recommend the double feature with Test Pilot, I did like Test Pilot a lot, and it is an excellent example of where we used to be and where we are now. As I watched the guys in Humpday try to recapture the "artistic" qualities of what they were doing, I enjoyed the comic irony that, in fact, there is nothing artistic about much of what we do in our lives, but in the retelling. That's where we can be artists.