Campy Joy

Living La Vida Loca

I watched Joy the other night, and in the end I said, "There is something about that movie, its like poppy, or just over stylized. I don't know the word for it."

"Campy!" Someone said.
"Yeah, it's campy!" Parts of it come off as downright ridiculous, like the way Bradley Cooper's eyes twinkle at the camera, while he pontificates about the products he decides to place in Kmart stores. Or the extreme closeups of Isabella Rossellini asking her husband's four questions for business partnership. It seemed more over the top than her character in Death Becomes Her.
After I watched American Hustle I felt bamboozled by the reviews of the Oscar contending movie. As the credits rolled, I said, "That movie reminds me of the last few seasons of Mad Men, a video catalog of STYLE, and thats about it."
David O. Russel could be the next Wes Anderson, and not because he likes to recycle his casts in new films, but because his style is so unabashedly distinct. Wes Anderson released The Royal Tenenbaums which is in my top ten favorite movies, so I don't mind that he went a little screwball. His greatness was identified, and now his fans indulge him because the quirkiness is interesting.

Kiki was laughing maniacally to herself the other day. I asked her, "What are you laughing at?"
Through her laughter, she said, "I thought of a movie called Dirty Potty, Dirty Potty. It's about a woman who sits on a dirty potty."
Not really shocked by her schadenfreude, I figured my exaggerated narrative when I give the public potty a wipe down before we use it had a lasting effect on her. I understand there is a time and a place for camp. So when I give real-life camp, like close ups of me shrieking, "yuck," as I wipe someone else's urine from a toilet seat I'm about to sit my kid on, it's to teach her that a dirty potty is something to be on the lookout for.

The Royal Tenenbaum soaks in its campy story because the goal is to portray an overall theme, like love and family, and in the case of Dirty Potty, Dirty Potty, cleanliness. I think the telling of an entrepreneurs rise from hardworking single mom to QVC mogul might have been better served with less camp. Not to get too political-correctness-gone-mad, but the campy story is making fun of the situation; a woman becoming successful in business. A story like this is so rarely told, and then it's clouded by style, the distinct style of a male director. This was an opportunity for Hollywood to do the right thing, and enlist a female director, but instead, we got American Hustle II, and the story of Joy was thrown out with the dirty mop-water.