Last night I watched the first installment of David Kelley‘s Love and Death, an HBO Max three-parter about the 1980 Candy Montgomery Texas murder saga. I had recently watched Candy, the Hulu five-parter starring Jessica Biel, that premiered in early May of ’22.
At this stage I’m totally Candy Montgomery’ed out.
I tried to roll with the Love and Death teleplay, but as I mentioned last month after watching the trailer, the Jessie Plemons casting got in the way. When Elizabeth Olsen‘s Candy asks Plemons character, Allan Gore, if he’s interested in having an affair, something inside me recoiled and went “no effing way…no!”
Posted last month: “It would be one thing if the actress playing Candy was shlumpy or overweight or less than dynamically attractive. But Olsen, 34, is a double-A hottie and has been so for many years, so why in the real world would she want to have sex with a C-minus guy (at best) who looks like Jesse Plemons? Fleshy and ginger-haired, pale and puffy-faced, tiny pig eyes.”
When Olsen and Plemons, after much hemming and hawing, finally do the deed in a motel room, I couldn’t stand it. Guys like Plemons never score with double-dishies. It just goes against human nature.
That said, I want to offer serious respect to Plemons for recently dropping all that weight…seriously.
Here’s how I put it in August of ’14: “Put simply, guys who got the girl used to look like guys who got the girl. And girls who attracted a lot of guys used to look like girls who attracted a lot of guys. But no longer. By today’s standards any homely or marginal or bearded, overfed, gross-looking guy or girl can hook up with good-looking types and nobody bats an eyelash.
“Blubbery Seth Rogen getting lucky with and impregnating Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up…uh-huh. Rogen married to and boinking Rose Byrne every which way in Neighbors…if you say so. Mark Duplass making sensitive-guy moves on Melissa McCarthy in Tammy…really? The bulky, nearly bald Steve Zissis connecting with Amanda Peet on HBO’s Togetherness…right. Anne Hathaway being sufficiently taken with Rafe Spall to move in with him in One Day…remarkable. The obviously desirable Anna Kendrick and Keira Knightley finding dweeby twee-male Mark Webber attractive and beddable in Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies and Joe Swanberg‘s Happy Christmas, respectively.
“This is complete bullshit in a sense but Apatow’s rules of attraction have been sinking in for years and so we’re all buying it…getting used to it.
“Movies have been a thriving industry for a little over a century now, and for most of this period romantic male leads were cut from a certain cloth. There are two categories, of course — studly, straight-arrow romantic leads (everyone from Cary Grant to Van Johnson to William Holden to Steve McQueen to Ben Affleck to Brenton Thwaites) to less studly, mostly pleasing but less-than-drop-dead sexy romantic male also-rans or “best friends” (i.e., Ralph Bellamy back in the ’30s, Wendell Corey in the ’50s).
“Romantic male leads used to be guys whom (a) women could pleasurably imagine going to bed with and/or marrying, and (b) straight guys recognized as superior alpha males with excellent genes. But Apatow has stepped in and said ‘fuck all that superior genes stuff….schlubby genes are actually pretty nice.’
“What’s changed is not only the quality of the alphas but the romantic also-rans — i.e., the guys who never got the girl. Over the last decade or so the rise of cheap digital cinema and…whatever, the Sundance Film Festival aesthetic plus downswirling GenY-ish attitudes plus a few Apatow-perpetrated scenarios have ushered in a politically correct notion that dweeby, dorky-looking guys or less-than-drop-dead-knockout girls (i.e., Lena Dunham being the standard-bearer) are just as acceptable in a romantic context as anyone else.”
Put yourself into this Candid Camera segment, and imagine if the teacher looked like Jesse Plemons. Do you think the schoolgirls would react the same way?
“Some Guys Shouldn’t Do Sexual“, posted on 3.23.23: There’s a major disconnect in the trailer for Love and Death (HBO Max, 4.27), a true-crime drama written by David E. Kelley and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter. Boiled down, the disconnect is Elizabeth Olsen saying to Jesse Plemons, “Are you interested in having an affair?”
I’m not having trouble digesting the facts of the case, which happened in 1980 in the small town of Wylie, Texas. Candy Montgomery (Olsen) was a terminally bored mother and housewife whose husband, Pat Montgomery (Patrick Fugit), was an electrical engineer. Montgomery’s close friend Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) was married to Allan Gore (Jessie Plemons). Candy and Allan wound up having an affair, and Betty freaked when she found out, which led to Candy doing some freaking of her own — she savagely murdered Betty with an axe, striking her dozens of times.
The Texas Monthly story about the tragedy was titled “Love and Death in Silicon Prairie, Part I: Candy Montgomery’s Affair,” and the subtitle read as follows: “She was a normal suburban housewife. All she wanted was a little fun with another man. She never really expected to kill her lover’s wife.”
All of this is fine, but biological reality is strongly arguing.
It would be one thing if the actress playing Candy was shlumpy or overweight or less than dynamically attractive. But Olsen, 34, is a double-A hottie and has been so for many years, so why in the real world would she want to have sex with a C-minus guy (at best) who looks like Jesse Plemons? Fleshy and ginger-haired, pale and puffy-faced, tiny pig eyes.
This isn’t how life works. Birds of a general feather tend to flock together, and saucy hotties don’t sleep with plump ginger dudes as a rule. I don’t care how bored they are.
The casting was more realistic in Candy, a previously dramatized version of the same story.
The five-episode series premiered on Hulu on 5.5.22. Here’s a visual comparison of the actual characters vs. actors who played them. Jessica Biel played Candy, Melanie Lynskey was Betty, Pablo Schreiber played Allan and Timothy Simons portrayed Pat.