An old man, a war hero with a dark past, is suddenly and unexpectedly paired with a young maiden from the wilderness. Haven’t I seen this one before?
“HEY,” you might be thinking, “What happened to the awesome McCain-Palin Buddy Cop movie poster you promised as a follow up to the awesome Obama-Biden Buddy Cop movie poster?? What kind of liberal, sexist trash is this?”
Well, let me explain what kind of liberal, sexist trash this is after the jump…
The real reason has nothing to do with McCain and Palin making for a good romance novel cover (just being opposite genders covered that much–is that sexist?). No, the real reason is that McCain and Palin make a very poor Buddy Cop movie pairing. They’re both white. They weren’t former rivals. Since Palin has such a short and obscure political history, we can’t tell if she really provides the same contrast to McCain that Biden does for Obama or Starsky does for Hutch.
But then there’s the all important gender issue. The Wikipedia article on Buddy Cop movies lists almost 40 examples of the genre, and as far as I can tell, only two are male-female pairings. One’s a porno (Hawaii Vice), and the other is…Theodore Rex:
That’s right, Whoopi Goldberg plays a female cop opposite a male…DINOSAUR…cop. Needless to say, this one went straight to video (here’s a YouTube link…I know you want to see how this turned out).
Notice how tempting it was to make an ageist joke about John McCain being a dinosaur. Notice how tastefully and graciously I avoided it: by doing a romance novel cover instead.
God, I love elevating the level of discourse. And speaking of discourse, some questions for the comments:
- Did I miss any notable male-female buddy cop pairings? TV shows count.
- For those with more knowledge of romance novels than I do, are there any reasons why McCain-Palin do or don’t make a good romance novel pairing (aside from the fact that they’re not in a torrid love affair)?
- Got a better tagline/title/pen name for a prominent Republican for the romance novel cover? If so, I’ll make a new version of the cover and post it along with the Obama-Biden sequel poster (still accepting suggestions for that one in the comments).
(Note: Special thanks to Mr. Stokes for helping with the concept. I.e., if you think this is sexist, blame him.)
Some more male-female buddy cop movies (though I certainly wouldn’t call them notable):
– Exit to Eden (Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell go undercover to some sort of S&M resort.)
– The Medallion (Jackie Chan and Claire Forlani look for some mystical thing, I think.)
The best male/female buddy cop movie is a little indy film I like to call _ROBOCOP_.
Also, you missed a plethora of “Female cop undercover in a world of secrets and seduction gets in too deep and questions whether she’s the hunter or the hunted” movies that have buddy cop elements. An old favorite mine is probably the old 80s flick _Impulse_. But they’re all pretty much exactly the same, and everybody who watched them watched them for the same reason — the 90 seconds or so of breasts permitted in R rated movies.
Going back to more mainstream non-sci-fi non-skinemax fare, the great male-female pairings along these lines are from TV, and they’re usually not-quite-cops (like P.I.s or spies or something similar). The contrast is usually between a guy who is very much into his job and experienced and a woman who has less professional experience, but is smart and sassy and makes him look stupid a lot (actually, that would match McCain and Palin quite well). They’re on television because they were watched by housewives who fantasized about living lives of danger without losing their femininity — not a target audience for action movies.
– MOONLIGHTING
– HART TO HART
– SCARECROW AND MRS. KING
to name a few
There seem to be a few British police procedurals that have male-female pairings.
See: The Inspector Lynley mysteries, Foyle’s War, Touching Evil, Cracker
I don’t know if you can call them “buddy cops,” but they are buddies, and they are cops, kinda. The reason they’re popular doesn’t have to do with the audience so much as the writers, I think. Most of these mystery series were based on mystery novel series which were written by women.
(By the way, the other type of “buddy cop” show the Brits seem to have, unsurprisingly, is the “upper class Oxford alum teams up with working class guy” show. It would be fun to see more American buddy cop movies that follow this form. They could pair up Ian McKellen and Jeff Foxworthy, or David Hyde Pierce and Bruce Willis, for example.)
On this side of the pond we have Bones, CSI, SVU, etc. Of course, “police procedural” isn’t the same genre as “cop action movie,” and they clearly have different audiences.
Anyway, I like the romance novel cover :)
Yeah, I think it’s notable that almost all the cop procedurals on TV now are male/female pairings in one way or another. But it’s also somewhat unfortunate they are so indistinguishable from one another, so they easily escape memory.
Also, _Resident Evil: Apocalypse_ (and maybe the last one which I didn’t watch), but more notably the Resident Evil video games, have a heavy man/woman buddy cop element to them – with Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine and other various partners that redo the formula over and over again.
And also, um, how the Hell did we miss Mulder and Scully in all this?
I mean, they had a man/woman buddy cop movie come out _This Summer_, for Chrissakes!
There’s an 80’s UK cop show called Dempsy and Makepeace. Makepeace was the upper-class English lady, Dempsy was some American oik from the Bronx (or somewhere suitably oikish)
I used to be quite the fan. But then I was ten…
I just learned what “oik” means. Thanks, Alec!
“Get Smart” if spies count.
“Spooks” (or “MI:5” as it’s called in the US) from England is another one of those procedural shows, but from across the pond.
And I’d argue that “True Lies” counts, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORhfA3Tc3XY
Dirty Harry teams up with Lacey from Cagney and Lacey in The Enforcer. Of course, she has to die.