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Notes Trailer Park Thursdays
You know how it is. You’re young, you’re tan, you’re possibly Italian and you just got laid off from your job selling underwear at a Newark Macy’s. Right? Right. New Katherine Heigel vehicle “One for the Money” knows and is basically your biography, as told to Theresa Guidice from Real Housewives of New Jersey. She then scribbled the story in lipstick on the back of a Hollywood Tans receipt, on her way to lunch with these two.Theresa knows that you are Heigel character Stephanie Plum. You have an at-times-thick, at-times-non-existent Jerseytalian accent and your hair always looks sort of wet. Like you, Stephanie is down on her luck. “Going through a bit of a rough patch” as your own nice, suburban mom would cautiously say to her friend over the phone as she watches you glumly setting the table in the same sweater you wore last time you were home. Unlike you, Stephanie will rally. She has dinner with the two aging cultural stereotypes she calls parents, and her grandma, a tragic Debbie Reynolds, sounding the death rattle of her storied career. During the family meal it is decided that Stephanie must find a joband, just as in real life, she finds one the very next day as a bail bondsman and is immediately outfitted with an automatic weapon. Nice and neat.
So here’s Stephanie! Getting excited about her job, being a sassbox, waving that gun all over town and really making it happen. Yay! This is the part of the story that we like! It’s heartening to see someone previously adrift get wholly engaged in something, even if that person is a lady played by Katherine Heigel and the thing she’s excited about is, from the looks of it, standing amongst a mess of plastic tarps in partially-completed high-rise constructions, quipping her head off and shaking that partial-perm all over the place. I desperately, desperately wanted the tagline for this movie to be “permed and dangerous” but I guess Christmas isn’t for another 3 weeks so, fine.
The crux of the story, we learn, is that Stephanie’s main mark is jerky-cute Joe Morelli (Jason O’Mara) who ALSO happens to be her high-school ex-boyfriend!! (right? or something?) He is, apparently, wanted dead or alive for the princely sum of…50 grand? Really? Dead OR alive? Bail dodgers who owe roughly the cost of a single year’s tuition at Sarah Lawrence College including books and meals, it’s okay to just kill them? Okay, lady in all the eyeliner. You’re the boss.
Along the way Stephanie joins forces with an elderly man with a penchant for indecent exposure, employing his bare testicles in her plot to bring her target to his knees. She also pals around with women who have not lost their sense of humor or their sanity despite their careers as sex-workers in the decaying post-industrial wasteland of Trenton, NJ.
Also, it’s sad to see Debbie Reynolds going the Betty White route.
I love Betty White a lot, and while I think she doesn’t need to take the broadest roles offered her, I applaud her for having a sense of humor about herself and reinvigorating her career. Still, Debbie Reynolds, don’t pull that. Old-lady-being-gross is Betty’s thing now, and as terrible as it is to have no roles for women over the age of 30 it’s still more terrible for each actress of high quality to line up, one by one and smilingly hop on the jokes-about-Johnny-Knoxville’s-balls Express. You don’t even pronounce thong right, Debbie. It rhymes with bong, not with lawn, don’t you see? You don’t belong in a place like this, kid. But maybe, what else can you do? It’s just a terrible situation and I’m sorry for you, Debbie. You deserve far better than this.Other people who deserve better than this are everyone, with the possible exception of Katherine Heigel who deserves exactly this. With the warmth of an Auschwitz outhouse, and the comic timing of a half-blind tortoise stumbling over a rocky impasse deep in the Appalachian hinterlands, she infuses the already delightful script with a brand of heady, too-tan charm all her own! Katherine Heigel. Heigel? Higel? Am I saying that right? Nobody knows!
In a surprise twist, Stephanie’s shocking addiction to junk food is shockingly revealed. Shockingly. I bet the producers really patted themselves on the back for sort of calling attention to the fact that, as Mindy Kaling and so many others have pointed out, movies and TV shows consistently boast lead females who, we are told, can NOT stop eating garbage despite stubbornly retaining a body that strongly suggests an adherence to a raw food diet and several daily trips to the gym.
“How does a person eat like you eat and look like you look?” Joe Morelli bellows, dumping her Chee-toh stash all over the floor. Finally, vindication, except no. Heigel-as-Stephanie’s answer? “Why ya gotta mess with my Tastycakes, huh?’Why indeed. Nice deflection, Stephanie, and nice deflection Hollywood. We will all now take the hint, and cease and desist our “messing with” the industrial “Tastycakes,” as it were. Consider disbelief forever suspended, and the pesky tools of logic packed away, finally and forever in grandpa’s heavy trunk from the war, and hidden in the old attic behind the Mall Madness game and the The Ab Roller.
What will happen to Stephanie? will taking her top off, tawkin’ like dis, and firing a gun at a paper target help her get her man, and GET her MAN?
I think, probably yes it will, but also, who cares?
WHEN WILL I SEE THIS??? When it’s on cable and I’m home on my mom’s couch drinking wine at 2 am.
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