Every Monday night at 9:00 Central Time, my wife Sierra and I host a “Live Movie Tweet” event on X using the hashtag #MondayMuggers. We rotate movie picks each week, and our tastes are quite different. Tonight, Monday December 9th, we’re watching LAST HOLIDAY starring Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Giancarlo Esposito, Alicia Witt, Michael Nouri, and Gerard Depardieu.
So why did Sierra pick LAST HOLIDAY, you might ask? It’s very simple. She loves the movie, and over time I’ve grown to enjoy it myself. I even wrote about it here:
My wife and I often have very different tastes in movies, but every now and then she’ll introduce a movie to me that I really enjoy despite my own cynical reservations. LAST HOLIDAY is such a movie.
Queen Latifah plays Georgia, a clerk in a department store in New Orleans. She works hard, lives according to her means, secretly loves one of her fellow employees Sean (LL Cool J), and dreams. She dreams of being a great chef and falling in love and having a family… someday. This all seems small and unimportant though when she’s given the news that she has brain cancer and will be dead in a few weeks. Armed with this news, she cashes in her savings and heads off on a trip of a lifetime, determined to enjoy the last moments of her life.
There are several things that I really appreciate about LAST HOLIDAY. First, Queen Latifah’s character Georgia is just a quality person. She treats people right, she works hard, she’s kind. This isn’t played as weakness either. She has a quiet dignity in a world where so many others are only worried about themselves. I wish there were more characters like this in cinema. Second, she has the opportunity to “live like you were dying.” I don’t know how many of y’all are familiar with the Tim McGraw song of the same name, but how different would we live our lives if we knew just how limited our time really is? We all worry so much about little things that don’t really matter in the big picture. It’s very satisfying as we watch Georgia enjoy herself with a freedom she has denied herself up to this point in her life. Third, we’re able to see how Georgia’s decency and honesty affects the other characters in the film. Once Georgia stops hiding her true thoughts and feelings, she begins to have an amazing impact on those around her. I think we’re all looking for connections with people where we can share who we really are. Whether it be Chef Didier (Gerard Depardieu), Gunther (Susan Kellerman) or Ms. Burns (Alicia Witt), Georgia affects others by being genuine. She doesn’t do anything spectacular, either. She’s just herself and that’s enough. There’s something powerful about that.
At the end of the day, LAST HOLIDAY is a feel good holiday film that aims to send us home with a smile on our face. It accomplishes that goal and a little more. Thanks to my wife, I gave LAST HOLIDAY a chance, and now I heartily recommend it.
Whenever I see that the 2002 film, Maid in Manhattan, is going to be playing on HBO or Cinemax, I always think to myself, “I can’t understand why everyone hates on this film. I mean, it’s not that bad. It may be predictable and silly but it’s kind of sweet and Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey have a tame but sexy chemistry.”
Of course, then I watch the film and I discover that Maid in Manhattan is not the film where Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey fall in love. That’s The Wedding Planner. Instead, Maid in Manhattan is the one where Jennifer Lopez is a maid who works in a big fancy hotel and who is a single mother to a precocious child who is obsessed with Richard Nixon. Maid in Manhattan is also the one where Jennifer Lopez falls in love with Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes plays a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Everyone is worried that he’ll never make it to Washington if people discover that his girlfriend is a maid. I think his bigger problem is that he’s a Republican running for the U.S. Senate in New York. (At least, I assume he’s a Republican because — as we learn from his conversations with Lopez’s son — he certainly seems to know a lot about and be rather sympathetic to Richard Nixon.)
I still like Maid in Manhattan, though perhaps not as sincerely as I like The Wedding Planner. Some of that is because Maid in Manhattan takes place during the Christmas season and I love a good wintry romance. Some of it is because this is probably the only mainstream film to feature people discussing the good points of Richard Nixon. There’s the fact that Jennifer Lopez is always perfectly cast as someone determined to make something out of her life, regardless of whether or not the world supports her or not. She’s always had the ability to make steely ambition sympathetic and that’s a good ability to have when you’re playing a maid who is determined to get promoted into management.
Finally, there’s the odd romantic pairing of Ralph Fiennes and Jennifer Lopez. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t work and yet, strangely, it does. Fiennes always brings a certain off-center, neurotic energy to his performances, which not only explains why he’s played so many villains but also why it’s strange to see him starring in a romantic comedy. And yet, that odd energy is exactly what Maid in Manhattan needs. It keeps the viewer on their toes and it makes the surprising discovery that Fiennes and Lopez have romantic chemistry all the more rewarding.
Don’t get me wrong, of course. This is a deeply silly movie and there’s a lot of less than sparkling dialogue and the plot falls apart if you even start to think about it. The entire story revolves around mistaken identity, with Fiennes not realizing that Jennifer Lopez is a maid and …. well, it’s all a bit unnecessarily complicated. The film also takes Fiennes’s political aspirations a bit too seriously. It’s not quite as bad the whole thing with Matt Damon running for the Senate in The Adjustment Bureau (“Due to his charming concession speech, he will someday be elected President,” — whatever, Beto) but it gets close.
But, still — I love romance and I love New York and the pairing of Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes in Maid in Manhattan is just too strange (and oddly effective) for me to resist.
Through the Shattered Lens 