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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: Four decades of the Nancy Meyers cinematic universe
We bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
There are certain things you’re guaranteed to find in a Nancy Meyers film – like polonecks, massive kitchens, and at least one hot doctor. Here’s a fun look at the taxonomy of her cinematic universe, from Private Benjamin to The Holiday.
(Vulture, approx 32 mins reading time)
In the Platonically ideal Nancy Meyers film, the protagonist is a woman either approaching 40 or significantly over, played by one of the most famous people in the universe: a Meryl, a Diane, a Goldie. She lives in or around New York City, California, or possibly in the U.K. She is well-off, white, and struggles with control issues. She is career focused, independent, and a little bit lonely. She loves to cook, but nobody is making her cook, and she’s grappling with some stage of divorce from a man who is a cad, but not irrevocably so. She lives in a house that is impossibly clean and well landscaped, wherein 70 percent of the film will take place. Mid-movie, she shops for gourmet groceries. An older man who has not been cast as a straight-up love interest in years is transformed into an unlikely sex object for our protagonist. Sex itself is rendered comic.
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