Romantic comedy and the perfect balance

Yesterday I mentioned that Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is the exemplar for romantic comedy, and it is, for its perfect synthesis of comedy and romance.

And bless Shakespeare for his genius - yet another example - the play was so far ahead of its time that it took almost 400 years to match that achievement. It took until 1940, and "His Girl Friday."

And then it took another 42 years to do it again, in 1982, with the television show "Cheers."

What the play, movie and television show all have in common is that the focus of the story is the couple (in the case of Cheers for the first five seasons before Shelly Long left the show), but even more essential: the romantic couple is perfectly balanced. Neither character is more important, and in the case of Much Ado and "His Girl", the couple is not only balanced but a very close match - they have quite a lot in common.

Cheers was more of an "opposites attract" scenario, but on the other hand it had five years, rather than five acts, to flesh out the relationship.

The relationship of Sam and Diane was so important to the first five seasons of Cheers there's even a Wikipedia article about the couple, which says that the show's creators...

...had intended Cheers to be a comedy about "family" of characters in a Boston bar, but quickly realized that the "Sam and Diane" romance was popular and decided that every episode would depict it. Burrows told the others several weeks after filming began, "Sam & Diane – that's your show."

Please note that Cheers was popular with a broad demographic, not just "chicks." I first saw it when I went to see what my father (then in his late 40s) was chuckling about in the TV room.

The Sam and Diane Wiki mentions the Tracy-Hepburn films as an inspiration, but I don't think they're quite up to the same standards - those films always seem to be more about the Hepburn character than evenly balanced.

Sam and Diane may be opposites - he's a working class regular-guy jock and she's a pretentious intellectual from the upper class, but they are equally matched in strength - Diane laughs at Sam's moves with (usually not very bright) women and Sam mocks Diane for her gullibility. Both have a past - Diane was ditched by her boyfriend in the first episode of Cheers and Sam destroyed his baseball career through alcoholism. Diane has mental health issues (which is how she meets Frasier Crane) and she leaves Sam at the end of season five to pursue a career as a writer (which doesn't work out very well, we later find.) But when they do occasionally find common ground, it's magic.

And bonus - the occasional feminist message, which was pretty progressive for the early 1980s.



The opposites-attract scenario can help sustain the sexual tension and prevent the couple from getting together right away, which is not so useful in a 3 hour play or 2 hour movie, but perfect for a serial TV show.

I've written about His Girl Friday before -  I believe that the Hildy character is such a good match for the Walter character because she was originally written as a man. Of course it helped that Rosalyn Russell (who was Howard Hawks' tenth choice for the role) hired her own writer:

In her autobiography, Life Is A Banquet, Russell wrote that she thought her role did not have as many good lines as Grant's, so she hired her own writer to "punch up" her dialogue. With Hawks encouraging ad-libbing on the set, Russell was able to slip her writer's work into the movie. Only Grant was wise to this tactic and greeted her each morning saying, "What have you got today?"

His Girl is often not put into the romantic comedy category, instead being called a "screwball comedy." NYTimes critic A.O. Scott does in this video clip - and Scott is focused on how the movie portrays the newspaper business.



We will be hearing from A. O. Scott again in this series on the romantic comedy.

Since Hildy was originally written as a man, she and Walter are both newspaper "men" and so completely understand each other when it comes to a good news story. And they both want to get back together again - Walter says that Hildy will be staying, rather than retiring from her career to be a housewife for an insurance salesman, but "she just doesn't know it yet." And she does end up staying, but not only because of Walter's desire - at the end of the movie Hildy breaks down in tears after one of Walter's tricks is finally revealed because, as she tells him, "I thought you were going to let me go." So they both got what they wanted, after much give and take and outsmarting each other in turn.

Give and take - that's what it's all about. I was conscious of this when I was writing Julia & Buddy and that's why I was pleased when one of the reviewers noticed:

Though Julia’s various phobias and stigmas and Buddy’s multiple problems and shortcomings pose a certain threat to their respective sanity, the two find solace in their understanding of one another.

That's what it's all about in a romantic comedy. Here we see Beatrice and Benedick go back and forth until they both have to give in mutually.

No matter how comedic a romantic comedy is, it is above all sincere about love. As Benedick says:

I'll tell thee what, prince; a college of
wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humour. Dost
thou think I care for a satire or an epigram? No:
if a man will be beaten with brains, a' shall wear
nothing handsome about him. In brief, since I do
purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any
purpose that the world can say against it; and
therefore never flout at me for what I have said
against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my
conclusion.

And sincerity about love is not in fashion these days - it's much more acceptable to be snarky, alternating with portentousness. Those are the scourges of our present dramatic age.

But before I get into that, what happened to this give-and-take and balance in contemporary rom-coms? We'll talk about that and the rise of the dude-bro "romantic comedy" next.

Romantic comedy disfunction

I've been thinking about romantic comedies alot lately since I'm working on Act II of JULIA & BUDDY, and for once I have to agree with Maureen Dowd - modern romantic comedies suck. And I'm not even talking about the hideous "men are lovable puerile slobs and women are controlling bitches" genre of the 2000s pioneered by "Knocked Up."

Both Maureen Dowd and A.O. Scott wrote about it - Scott being first in 2008. He noted:

And yet, while the romantic comedy has almost always trafficked in happy endings, that happiness is rarely accompanied by a sense of risk or exhilaration. When you think of, say, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn — or even Doris Day and Rock Hudson — you recall the emotional combat of two strong-willed, independent individuals ending in mutual conquest. Love, in those old pictures, was a dangerous and noble sport that required skill and cunning as well as commitment.

I'm talking about stuff from the last twenty years. There's a good article at The A.V. Club "The ugliest truth: 24 romantic-comedy characters who don't deserve love. I admit I've seen none of these movies because I read the reviews first and they sounded like they stank on ice - and the commentary here confirms it.

Sleepless in Seattle: Romantic comedies often depend on telling audiences what they wish was true. Case in point: in Sleepless In Seattle, the seemingly happy engaged Meg Ryan hears Tom Hanks talking on the radio, falls in love with his voice, and spends the rest of the movie re-arranging her life to find him. In the real world, these would be the mentally unbalanced actions of a disturbed, desperate person, a quixotic quest for a relationship that couldn’t possibly live up to expectations. While Seattle pays some lip service to Ryan’s strange behavior, she’s ultimately rewarded for her "courage" with the most ideal meet-cute imaginable.

As Good As It Gets: the romantic tension between Hunt and Nicholson never gets past the dictated-by-script phase, partly because Nicholson looks like a human-Sleestak hybrid, and partly because his newfound decency doesn’t make up for a life’s worth of vicious hostility.

You've Got Mail: Hanks, as the scion of a Barnes & Noble-like chain of heartless mega-bookstores, essentially wins over Meg Ryan, the proprietor of a boutique children’s bookstore, by putting her out of business. He's the friendly face of the McDonald’s-ization of our culture, and Ephron seems to encourage Ryan to put up a good fight before eventually yielding to the soulless comforts of a literary Big Mac.

Garden State: The myth of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was pushed to its most egregious extreme in Garden State, where beautiful Natalie Portman "redeems" a self-pitying, thoroughly unlikeable wimp (Zach Braff) by inexplicably falling in love with him, in spite of his rancid self-absorption and unseemly level of pussitude. In fact, she enables his bullshit, taking out a bottle to preserve his single, precious tear when he finally works up the nerve to cry over paralyzing his mother back when he was a kid.

Woody Allen in anything: nobody is more responsible for turning neurotic, paternalistic, essentially self-centered men into supposedly smart, sensitive, even sexy objects of affection for women foolish enough to accept personality traits that would (rightly) seem obnoxious coming from much better-looking guys.

Technically I have seen Woody Allen movies - although not since the early 1990s, and after reading Mia Farrow's autobiography, the very thought of Woody Allen makes me nauseous, and I just don't want to watch even his old movies that I liked.

I was griping about the absurdity of the stalker-triumphant-in-love of the Pulitzer Prize-winning TALLEY'S FOLLY, and there was a link from the A.V. Club article that made me chortle Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested

The movie "His Girl Friday" is always described as a "screwball comedy" but I think it's one of the best romantic comedies ever made, which is pretty impressive considering that in the Broadway play on which it was based, THE FRONT PAGE, the Rosalind Russell character was a man, and according to the very good Wikipedia article on the movie, the only reason the gender was changed was: "...during auditions, Howard Hawks's secretary read reporter Hildy Johnson's lines. Hawks liked the way the dialogue sounded coming from a woman, resulting in the script being rewritten to make Hildy female."

The movie is charmingly modern in its view of the Hildy character - she wants to settle down and be a conventional housewife with the boring guy played by Ralph Bellamy, but Cary Grant's character convinces her that she would be much happier as a "newspaper man." And clearly they have much more in common than Hildy does with Ralph Bellamy.

Some fascinating stuff from the Wiki:

In her autobiography, Life Is A Banquet, Russell wrote that she thought her role did not have as many good lines as Grant's, so she hired her own writer to "punch up" her dialogue. With Hawks encouraging ad-libbing on the set, Russell was able to slip her writer's work into the movie. Only Grant was wise to this tactic and greeted her each morning saying, "What have you got today?"

Grant's character describes Bellamy's character by saying "He looks like that fellow in the movies, you know... Ralph Bellamy!" According to Bellamy, the remark was ad libbed by Grant. Columbia studio head Harry Cohn thought it was too cheeky and ordered it removed, but Hawks insisted that it stay. Grant makes several other "inside" remarks in the film. When his character is arrested for a kidnapping, he describes the horrendous fate suffered by the last person who crossed him: Archie Leach (Grant's real name).

A clip from "His Girl Friday" - the entire movie is available, at least for now, for free on Youtube.

Eileen's sister the Communist

Unlike my own mother, my friend Laura's mother was interested in politics and culture. My strongest memory of Eileen McGowan was her at her usual spot on the living room sofa watching the Watergate hearings. My first political involvement was going door-to-door giving out McGovern campaign flyers at her behest. My parents voted for Nixon.

And because Mrs. McGowan (I never called her Eileen myself) was interested in the arts, she took an interest in my cultural affairs. She knew that Laura and I had written our own fan fiction for "Tom Sawyer" - something my mother never knew, and frankly would not have cared had she known.

My mother has never recommended any literature to me, because she has no interest in literature herself, and has bragged that she got through high school English courses by reading the Classic Comics versions of novels.

Mrs. McGowan recommended I read "My Sister Eileen." I was never sure why exactly, other than, I guess, she enjoyed the book herself and wanted me to enjoy it. But I could not have been any older than eleven or twelve when she recommended it to me - in fact I wonder now if she recommended it to me because the author, Ruth McKenney, died in July 1972, only sixty years old. Her NYTimes obituary is here. Mrs. McGowan herself died in the mid-1980s and was in her late 50s.

I think I tried to read the book but didn't find it interesting. Primarily because it was about adults and at that time I was only interested in books about people my age.

So on Saturday I was researching for the next NYCPlaywrights podcast and wondering if I should put an audio clip from "His Girl Friday" into the podcast, since the theme is "romantic comedy" and I think the movie counts. Also, it's now in the public domain.

So while watching the movie for the tenth time, I was Googling around about the people in the movie and saw that Rosalind Russell, in addition to starring in "His Girl Friday" also starred in the first adaptation of of the book "My Sister Eileen." So I read the Wiki page for that and saw that the book was based on stories McKenney first published in The New Yorker - and since I have a New Yorker subscription which provides access to its entire archive I tracked those stories down.

Then I read McKenney's Wiki. Very very sad. "My Sister Eileen" was based on McKenney's adventures with her sister Eileen, who died at age 27 in a car crash, days before the theatrical adaptation of the book opened. McKenney's husband killed himself on her 44th birthday.

On a happier note, McKenney's daughter is New York State Supreme Court Justice Eileen Bransten, who just retired, but not before handing down this decision:

Over the opposition of lawyers for a company owned by President Donald J. Trump, State Supreme Court Judge Eileen Bransten ruled Thursday that a condominium on the Upper West Side could remove the bronze letters spelling out his name from its 46-story building.

McKenney became famous for her humorous stories about her family but what she really wanted to write about was labor issues. And until they were ousted by the Party, she and her husband were Communists.

And in this wacky Internet age, the documentation of their purge is available online.

McKenney's husband Richard Bransten, writing under his pen name Bruce Minton and speaking on behalf of himself and McKenney makes it clear that the couple believed that the US Communist party was not hard-core enough for their liking:

The leadership does not emphasize the great truth that workers must learn; Only socialism can make the people free, only socialism can rid the world of war and fascism. By no word does the American Communist Party at its National Committee Meeting hold the capitalist system to the full light of scorn. The leadership does not educate the American masses to the horror and evil of capitalism, to the awful reality that capitalism offers only terror, lynch, poverty, oppression of women, persecution of minorities, starvation, exploitation, racism, enslavement of peoples and nations, fascism, and war.

Wow, they took their Communism very seriously.

I'm afraid like all serious idealists they were doomed to disappointment. I was first disabused of political idealism when I sat in on a food co-op meeting when I was eighteen and for most of the meeting it was simply people complaining about other people in the group.

No organization of any significant size, from a Philadelphia food co-op to the Communist party will ever be peopled by enough obsessive policy wonks and nerds to satisfy the purity tests of idealists.

More people than not would rather get by with Classic Comics than making the greater effort to read the original. 

Would-be organizers of human beings ignore that at their peril.

Taking back the romantic comedy

In preparation for the first of my three promised rants I have posted the list of useful links on this topic from the NYCPlaywrights weekly email blast from July 26.

The Romantic Comedy Is Dead

by Andrew Romano

They Came Together is a comedy. This much is clear. The movie stars Paul Rudd (I Love You, Man) and Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation). It was co-written by Michael Showalter (The State). It was directed by David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer). These are some of the funniest people in the business. When you see it, you’re supposed to laugh.

And yet I left the theater the other day feeling sort of… sad.

The reason, I think, is that They Came Together isn’t just a comedy—it’s a parody of romantic comedies. Molly (Poehler) owns a quirky mom-and-pop candy shop on New York’s Upper West Side. Joel (Rudd) works at the big Corporate Candy Company that’s threatening to put Molly out of business. At first Molly and Joel hate each other—and then (surprise!) they fall in love.

If the story sounds familiar, that’s because it is; Wain & Co. borrowed it from You’ve Got Mail (which itself was a riff on the 1940 Jimmy Stewart classic The Shop Around the Corner). Many of their jokes refer to Nora Ephron’s canonical 1998 romcom as well. There’s Joel and Molly’s over-the-top obsession with New York, which everyone keeps reminding us is “almost like another character” in their tale. There’s the used bookstore where Joel and Molly finally discover they’re right for each other. There’s Joel and Molly’s sense of shared bemusement at the increasing intricacy of the modern coffee-industrial complex. And so on.

But You’ve Got Mail isn’t the only movie They Came Together strip-mines for satire. Basically the film is a compendium of every romcom cliché known to man, lovingly compiled, combined, and amplified to an absurd degree. Molly acting clumsy. Joel and his bros discussing lady problems while shooting hoops. Molly ordering food a very specific way. Molly and Joel playing Charades at a holiday party. A falling-in-love montage. A trying-on-clothes montage. “I’ll have what she’s having.” If you’re a fan of the romcom genre, watching all of these gags in quick succession is dizzying, delirious, and ultimately very funny.

Appealing young actresses who could have been this generation’s Meg Ryans or Julia Robertses—actresses like Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone, and Scarlett Johansson—have read the writing on the wall and increasingly gravitated toward big tentpole jobs.

It’s also strangely depressing. Here’s why: As They Came Together wore on, I started to realize that every movie it was referencing was at least 15 years old. That no one under the age of, say, 30 would have any clue what Rudd and Poehler were parodying.

And then it hit me: Could it be that the Romantic Comedy is dead—and that I didn’t notice until it was too late? How in the name of Meg Ryan did this happen?

I’m afraid the answer to the first question is yes. I should start by saying (in case you haven’t figured it out already) that I really like romantic comedies. Sure, they can be conventional. But pop songs tend to be conventional, too, and that doesn’t dull the dopamine rush of a perfect chorus. A well-made romcom—It Happened One Night, Sleepless in Seattle, Say Anything…, Groundhog Day, The Apartment—works in much the same way. It’s a dazzling machine doing exactly what it was designed to do. 

MORE…

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/07/the-romantic-comedy-is-dead.html

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WHO KILLED THE ROMANTIC COMEDY?

Rom-coms used to be a cash cow --and wildly popular with audiences. What happened?

by Amy Nicholson

The corpse lay crumpled on the conference table, close enough that the studio executive could tug on the red heel of her Louboutin. She'd been lying there unnoticed, or perhaps just ignored, for quite some time. Her wedding veil was tattered, and someone had spilled coffee on her white satin dress. A receipt had been crudely shoved in her bouquet.

Once, she'd been worth a fortune -- at least $100 million, according to her friends, who sat at home and rewatched tapes of her at her prime. Every woman had wanted to be her: Julia, Meg, Sandra, Reese. Not anymore.

The romantic comedy is dead.

In 1997, there were two romantic comedies among the top 20 box office performers. In 1998 and 1999, there were three. Each cracked $100 million in sales. Even as recently as 2005, five romantic comedies topped $100 million at the box office.

Contrast that with 2013: There's not one romantic comedy in the top 50 films. Not even in the top 100.

Men and women are still falling in love, of course. They're just not doing it onscreen -- and if they do, it's no laughing matter. In today's comedies, they're either casually hooking up or already married. These are comedies of exasperation, not infatuation.

It's not only that audiences are refusing to see romantic comedies. It's that romantic comedies aren't getting made, at least not by the major studios. The Big Wedding, 2013's sole boy-meets-girl-meets-matrimony comedy, was unceremoniously dumped into theaters by big indie Lionsgate and limped to No. 101 on the chart.

What happened?

MORE… 

http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-03-05/film/who-killed-the-romantic-comedy/full/

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WHY CAN’T THEATRE AND ROMCOMS GET IT TOGETHER?

From As You Like It to The Front Page, theatre was once captivated by romantic comedies. Did we get too cynical?

By Lyn Gardner

The other week I interviewed the playwright David Greig and the musician Gordon McIntyre about their lo-fi musical, Midsummer. The show (opening at Soho theatre this week) is being sold on the novelty of its indie soundtrack – but when I saw it in Edinburgh last year, it wasn't the music that stood out, it was the romance. Indie music in theatre isn't so uncommon. But romantic comedy? If there'd been popcorn for sale in the Traverse foyer, it could hardly have seemed more out-of-place.

So is theatre down on romcom? It wasn't always thus: consider As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream et al, and Shakespeare starts to look (well, just a little) like the Nora Ephron of the Elizabethan age. Romcoms were popular, too, in the theatre of the early and mid-20th century. Some of the great Hollywood examples – The Philadelphia Story, The Shop Around the Corner, His Girl Friday (based on Hecht and MacArthur's The Front Page) – were cribbed from hit plays. Bernard Slade's Romantic Comedy, recently revived by (and starring) Tom Conti, was one of the genre's last hurrahs.

Of course, there are still plenty of romances in theatre – but not many plays that satisfy themselves with romance alone, and fewer still that are funny. The classic romcom traces the lovers' will-they-won't-they trajectory up until consummation – and then blushingly draws a veil. But when modern stage comedies take love as their subject – Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, for example – they seldom send us home with romantic illusions left intact. It's instructive to compare Stoppard's theatre romcom with his script for Shakespeare in Love.

More…

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/jan/12/theatre-romcom-romantic-comedies

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BITTER GERTRUDE

…I’ve long had the desire to fire every romantic comedy into the sun. I despise romcoms, and I never spent time figuring out why. Now that the answer is in my face, it’s undeniable: they’re one way we disseminate all of the worst ideas about relationships we have as a culture, including (especially) the male master narrative. What was once just an annoyance to me now looks like the worst kind of reprehensible irresponsibility. And that’s just one tiny corner of the art we produce. 

It’s easy to say, Oh, it’s just a play; it’s just a movie, etc. But there is no “just.” The narrative art form is POWERFUL. The human brain can experience narrative as if it’s happening in real life. The brain of a person telling a story and a person listening to that story experience neural coupling. Art is where we discuss who we are as a culture; our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our past, our imagined future. It’s the most important aspect of how our culture is created and how it is changed. Stories are the building blocks of culture, and we’re the ones who create and tell those stories.

More…

http://bittergertrude.com/2014/05/29/our-role-in-this-as-artists/

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BITCHES IS CRAZY

~ OR ~

Why I despise and loathe the Pulitzer Prize-winning play TALLEY'S FOLLY

In which I explain why I have a problem with a play that presents a stalker, who forces a woman to remain in a boathouse until she submits, as a romantic hero.

by N. G. McClernan

When I first saw Lanford Wilson’s TALLEY’S FOLLY, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, I didn’t even pick up on the horrific stalking and bullying aspect. This was in the early 1990s, when I first became interested in writing plays, and I considered it homework to go and see a community theatre production of the play in Haddonfield New Jersey. I picked the play exactly because it had won the Pulitzer Prize: I figured it had to be good. Like Shakespeare good.

But instead I was bored. It’s a ninety minute play that felt like two hours, but I gritted my teeth and stayed until the end. As I was walking out of the theatre I remember wondering whether I should abandon playwriting and go back to painting. If that was theatre, then I hated theatre.

My impression of the play, based on that long-ago production, was a long boring conversation, with lots of exposition, and the man doing most of the talking. I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on the truly repulsive underlying message of the play - perhaps it was the way it was directed - I don't remember any physical force used, as it is specified in the stage directions of the published script. 

Cultural gatekeepers have always been men (or men's female enablers.) To this day the vast majority of movie and theatre critics in the traditional media are men. But thanks to the new technologies all kinds of excellent feminist commentary is available to the public. One of the best purveyors of feminist culture theory is a web site called Tiger Beatdown. And one of its best essays is called TIGER BEATDOWN FOR DUDES Presents: That’s Not Funny. No, Seriously Dude, It’s Not.

More…

http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2012/09/theatre-essay-bitches-is-crazy-or-why-i.html

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Can the Romantic Comedy Be Saved?

By Claude Brodesser-Akner

   

It was not that long ago when romantic comedies were a reliable date-night staple at the box office. It was a carefree, frothy time, when Julia, J. Lo, Kate, Katherine, Sandra, and Reese could show up onscreen, meet cute with just about any handsome male specimen, and pull in seven figures. But audiences seem to be falling out of love with the genre: The near-total rejection of Gerard Butler’s Playing for Keeps ($12 million, and fading fast) is only the latest casualty.

Earlier this year, Wanderlust ($17 million) and The Five-Year Engagement ($28 million) fizzled, while the genre’s once-reigning doyenne, Reese Witherspoon, saw her hybrid action/rom-com, This Means War, met with yawning indifference: It grossed just $54 million domestically, ten million less than its explosion-heavy budget. The highest-grossing rom-com of the year was Kevin Hart’s Think Like a Man ($91 million), and that film never truly broke out beyond its predominantly African-American target audience. “It is the hardest time of my 30 years in the business of doing them,” said Lynda Obst, the producer of romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle, One Fine Day, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Vulture asked several top filmmakers, producers, and executives for a heart-to-heart about the reasons why the genre is getting the cold shoulder — and as with most splintering relationships, there’s plenty of blame thrown back and forth: Studio chiefs blame audiences and stars, directors and producers blame studios and audiences, and agents blame their clients.

The downward slope of the rom-com’s fortunes has been steep. Just a decade ago, theaters were packed with date-night fare that took in hundreds of millions of dollars: In 2002, the top five highest-grossing romantic comedies alone — My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Sweet Home Alabama, Maid in Manhattan, and Two Weeks Notice — collectively took in a whopping $555 million in domestic box office. There were seven rom-coms in the top 100 films of that year, and this septet averaged a $96 million take. In 2008, there were eleven rom-coms in the top 100, with an average domestic gross of $77 million. By 2010, there were fourteen rom-coms in the top 100 highest grossing films — but their average domestic gross had dropped to $53 million. This year the average gross in the top 100 is up a hair to $54 million, but that’s based on only four movies that have cracked that list. (Many more did not.)

More…

http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/can-the-romantic-comedy-be-saved.html

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3 WAYS THE ROM-COM CAN SAVE ITSELF FROM EXTINCTION

Clearly, the rom-com is in dire straits, and things only seem to be getting worse.

by Phoebe Robinson

This week marks the 25th anniversary of arguably the best romantic comedy of the modern era: "When Harry Met Sally." (I write “arguably” to appease the ornery person who always steps to me, proclaiming "Love Actually" is the new sheriff in town.) And to that I say, “Show me the receipts,” which usually includes someone pointing out the film’s omnipresence on basic cable as proof, but I’m still unconvinced because Actually contains one of the most ludicrous love stories of recent memory. Colin Firth's character, Jamie, falls in love with a gorgeous, non-English speaking foreigner and they subsequently get engaged thanks to her father's response to Jamie's asking for his daughter's hand in marriage: "Who? Her? Sure." O...K. 

Clearly, the rom-com is in dire straits and things only seem to be getting worse. "Think Like A Man Too," which was released three weeks ago, has decent box office numbers ($61 million dollars), but is saddled with a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In the past, this sort of critical lashing would have been an anomaly for movies of its ilk instead of what it is now: par for the course.

Since the early aughts, the average rom-com now is not only getting bad reviews and poor to middling box office returns, but major film studios are releasing fewer of these films in theaters (in 2002, there were 13, including "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" which grossed $241 million domestically; this year, only five romantic comedies are coming out).

The rom-com genre is going the way of the wooly mammoth, but I have three ways it can save itself from extinction: 

1) Let’s get some comedy up in here!

The genre is called “romantic comedy,” so why are so many of the films low on the funny? Where’s the witty Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell banter of "His Girl Friday," the satire of "Clueless," the go-for-broke rom-com/gross out humor mash up of "There’s Something About Mary"? Too often what's passing for "comedy" in rom-coms these days is a basic Katherine Heigl-type chick dressed in basic beige linens who vacillates between klutzy and shrill. Ugh.

More…

http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/3-ways-the-rom-com-can-save-itself-from-extinction

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I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You

Lindy West

We open in a fucking airport. A fucking AIRPORT!!! Of course Love Actually, the apex of cynically vacant faux-motional cash-grab garbage cinema would hang its BIG METAPHOR on the bleak, empathy-stripped cathedral of turgid bureaucracy known as "the airport." Of course. And then, of course, Hugh Grant's voice pipes in to tell us how inspiring and magical the airport is, because when you're at the airport you can't help but notice that "love actually IS all around." THE FUCKING AIRPORT!!!!!

If that's not the epitome of unexamined privilege—declaring that the airport is your favorite place—then I don't know what is. Welcome to Love Actually.

Bill Nighy and his technicolor dream-blouse are in the studio recording a shitty, vapid Christmas song in hopes of squeezing a few dollars out of idiots who will pay for any tatty garbage as long as it has a celebrity's name attached (way better metaphor for your movie than "the airport," BTW!). Bill Nighy keeps ruining perfectly good takes so he can yell about how shitty his shitty Christmas song is, because Bill Nighy doesn't care about the valuable time of the hardworking professionals who are just trying to finish his vanity record so they can get home to their families. Not Bill Nighy's problem! He's done heroin before!

Question: Can somebody please adjust Bill Nighy's microphone so he doesn't have to cop that weird squat anymore? I should be able to watch a movie without my brain being forced to contemplate the current dilation of Bill Nighy's butthole. Thx.

Text appears on the screen to alert us that it's five weeks before Christmas. Why are you recording a Christmas single FIVE WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS!?!? This movie is so fucking incompetently made that even the people doing their fake jobs inside the movie are incompetent.

Colin Firth's girlfriend is sick. NBD, right!? WRONG. Turns out, she isn't sick with the flu—she's sick with ColinFirth'sBrother'sDongitis! Colin Firth cannot deal, so he runs off to France all sulky to fucking type a novel on a fucking typewriter in a mansion. Siiiigh! "Alone ah-GAYN!"

This old French woman shows up at Chateau de Firth and is like, "Here, I found you a lady. I'm literally giving you this lady." Score! Free lady! The lady is named Aurelia and she only speaks Portuguese, and so does her entire family, apparently, even though all of them live in France. It's irritating.

Colin Firth falls in "love" with Aurelia at first sight, establishing Love Actually's central moral lesson: The less a woman talks, the more lovable she is.

None of the women in this movie fucking talk. All of the men in this movie "win" a woman at the end. This goddamn movie.

More…

http://jezebel.com/i-rewatched-love-actually-and-am-here-to-ruin-it-for-al-1485136388

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The greatest romantic comedy: His Girl Friday

Hawks stages an exceptional battle of wits and sexual politics between Grant and Russell, two performers matched in their capacity to hurl  verbal jabs with machine gun speed. Russell’s Hildy Johnson wants out of the newspaper game to marry her dopey insurance salesman fiancé, Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), and make a family in Albany. She arrives at the Morning Post’s offices to tell her editor, Grant’s Walter Burns, of her plans to wed Baldwin the next day after catching a train that evening. With little time to maneuver, Burns concocts a scheme to keep her around, in part because his paper needs her sharp reporting, and also because he still loves her. “Oh, she’s staying,” Burns quips. “She just doesn’t know it yet.”  His biggest hook is the execution of Earl Williams (John Qualen), a cop-killer who should have been tried with an insanity plea. Should the Morning Post cover the story, they could save Williams’ life and simultaneously rub out the careers of the corrupt Mayor (Clarence Kolb McCue) and his ineffectual sheriff (Gene Lockhart). Burns dangles the story in front of Hildy, lays an effective guilt trip on Baldwin, and Hildy eventually agrees to write one last story, in exchange for Burns signing a life insurance policy with Baldwin that will provide the new couple a financial nest egg. After Hildy interviews Williams to play up the insanity angle, the prisoner escapes, creating a frenzy of newspapermen trying to get the scoop. Working together again with Burns to get the story makes Hildy realize she still loves being a reporter and still loves Burns too.

More...

http://www.deepfocusreview.com/reviews/hisgirlfriday.asp

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Study: Rom-Coms Could Save Your Marriage

by Kat Stoeffel

Watching and discussing romantic movies is roughly as effective as couples therapy in reducing the divorce rate among newlyweds, according to a University of Rochester study published in December's Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Researchers looked at 174 couples over the first three years of their marriage, when one in four couples divorces. Couples were randomly assigned to one of three month-long programs — conflict management, compassion training, or movie-and-talk — as a kind of secular surrogate for the marriage-preparation classes offered by churches. The conflict-management and compassion-training groups required about twenty hours of therapist-supervised lectures and practice sessions, whereas movie-and-talk required half as much time, involved watching movies, and was almost entirely done at home. But all three groups halved the divorce rate of the control group, from 24 percent to 11 percent. 

Their conclusion? People already know how to fix their relationship problems, they just need the excuse to think and talk about them…“

http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/01/study-rom-coms-could-save-your-marriage.html

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OBVIOUS CHILD - Take Back the Rom-Com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYzPEgsIwHk

More misuse of the term "romantic comedy"

Richard Brody, one of the two movie critics (both old white males) at the New Yorker gets on my nerves in the worst way. There is just something so alien about his perspective on the world, not to mention his creepy obsession with the TV show Girls.

But for the most part I've resisted the temptation to slam Brody and chose instead to just avoid reading him. But when I saw the headline for his article The Troubling Power of Romantic Comedies show up in my Facebook newsfeed I had to read it, although I knew that I would not be happy with what Brody had to say - and I was absolutely correct.

Brody, like so many many others, doesn't seem to understand what the term "romantic comedy" means. Here is his description of the movie "The Other Woman" which he is claiming is a romantic comedy:

Cameron Diaz plays Carly Whitten, a New York corporate lawyer who is trailing a long string of unhappy relationships; she finds sudden love with Mark King (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a handsome and virile venture capitalist who neglects to inform her that he’s married. In planning an erotic surprise for him at his Connecticut home, she meets Mark’s wife, Kate (Leslie Mann), who, in turn, confronts her about the affair. From that confrontation, a friendship quickly develops (as Carly says, “We’ve been played by the same man”). When they suspect that there’s another other woman (Kate Upton) in the picture, they take off in pursuit and become amateur detectives, and ultimately learn even more about Mark’s hidden life.

On what planet is that in any way "romantic"? It's a straight-up revenge fantasy!

And as much as I loathe Brody, he's not at all the only one out there confused by what a true romantic comedy is. As I've blogged about here, the misogynist "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is considered a romantic comedy when it is about punishing and humiliating Sarah Marshall for dumping the movie's protagonist.

And then there is the hideous, misogynist "Love, Actually" which is finally getting called out, as I wrote about here.

I think the problem can be summed up by the fact that a good percentage of men agree with this man writing in defense of prostitution (in response to this article by Katha Pollitt):

I'd suggest that having an extra-monogamous outlet that isn't fraught with relationship shit is valuable even without patriarchy.

This is the new ideal in "romantic comedies" these days - female bodies as outlets that aren't fraught with relationship shit.

This approach to "romance" is most clearly demonstrated in a web series called "Compulsive Love" which I blogged about several times last year. The series isn't specifically billed as a romantic comedy, but one of its producers, Kevan Tucker, claims it is:

“The show doesn’t trade on irony, cynicism or satire at all. It is unabashedly romantic; in love with the idea of being in love."

It is about as "romantic" as a porno, which makes sense because the story, written by Adam Szymkowicz (we have 62 Facebook friends in common) is pretty much indistinguishable from a porno - man sees woman, man has sex with woman, man moves onto the next woman.

The underlying moral of "Compulsive Love" is that everything would be great with "romance" until some individuating aspect of the woman intrudes on all the sexy sexy sex.

The only time the woman's personality comes into a "Compulsive Love" storyline is as a plot device to break up the protagonist and his latest fuck-doll so he can move onto the next one. One woman becomes a nun. One is controlled by her mother. One is a lesbian.

And "Compulsive Love" has no problems with prostitution - one of these "romantic" storylines involves women who "punish" the romantic hero for trying to weasel out of a gambling debt - which of course he does because is good to be asshole in Bizarro World - by forcing him to pay off the debt by performing cunnilingus.

Yes, that's what Kevan Tucker considers "in love with the idea of being in love."

Although maybe the most repulsive example of misogyny claiming to be romantic comedy is the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Talley's Folly. The story is about a brave hero who stalks a woman for a year, humiliates her, insults her family, and physically restrains her from getting away from him. He wins her love in the end, of course. 

The problem is that "romantic comedy" is now being made and defined by misogynist oafs who don't value women except as prizes for men who refuse to take "no" for an answer, and as relationship-free fuck-dolls.

In case you are wondering at this point if it's possible to even make a non-misogynist comedy, the answer is yes, yes it is. Here are some I've collected on this blog:

• The African Queen
• Casanova (with Heath Ledger in the title role)
• Hysteria
• Impromptu
• It's Complicated
• His Girl Friday
• The Little Mermaid
• The Owl and the Pussycat

non-misogynist romance movies

I was looking at iTunes movie listings recently and was appalled to see that some hard-core misogynist movies are listed in the Romance category. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, for instance. I haven't seen the movie because it sounds like a huge reeking piece of misogyny - naturally coming from Judd Apatow - based on every review I've read. But if even half of what is described in this review at Tiger Beatdown is true, it is best if I don't watch the movie because if I did, I would have an irresistible urge to hunt down Apatow and every evil freak who green-lighted this movie.

I did, unfortunately, see Love Actually. I don't want to relive that experience. Read the NYTimes review of Love Actually to get some idea of how obnoxious and misogynist this movie is. And so many people think this is such a charming lovely Christmas movie. Morons. It's "romance" as conceived by evolutionary psychologists - a field of dreams for men of all ages, and a horrible nightmare for any woman over 30. You think I exaggerate? Compare these two scenarios from the movie:

Guy considered ugly in the UK goes to America where the women love his accent so much that he is taken back to an apartment to have a five-way - I kid you not - with them. And then he finds true love with one of them and goes back to the UK with her and another one in tow, to give to his buddy like some retarded sexbot souvenir.

vs.

Laura Linney, who should be horse-whipped for accepting this role, plays an American woman who can not have love ever again because her brother, a violent psychotic, has access to a telephone literally twenty-four hours a day at the psych ward he is committed to and therefore calls her all the time night and day. That's the only "love" that Linney's character gets - with a violent psychotic brother living at the worst psychiatric facility ever.

Apparently, once upon a time, romance movies with strong female characters weren't considered "chick flicks" and even men could admit to enjoying them. I expect this is because at the height of the age of the Patriarchy there was no question that women were inferior to men, so men could enjoy a strong woman character without feeling pussy-whipped. But no longer. Now that Patriarchy is on the defensive, the only way for a bro to enjoy a movie about romance is to ensure that women are humiliated, as in the Sarah Marshall movie, or humiliated (Emma Thompson's character) AND deprived of romantic love entirely due to being the slave of a psycho (Linney), while the all the male characters' dreams come true in Love, Actually.

That's how evil filmmakers are these days. I would have said "Hollywood" but Love Actually was made in the UK.

There are, however, the rare pro-woman, even, *gasp* feminist romances out there. The minority to be sure, which is why it's important to make a list. I decided to start making that list:

• His Girl Friday - this is a feminist movie by accident - the Rosalind Russell character, Hildy, was originally a male but the director changed it. Also, ad-libbing was allowed so Russell hired a writer to give her bon mots to give her character. But even if by accident, I'll take it. Because it was originally written for a man, the character's trajectory is to want to get out of the newspaper business and go live in the sticks and settle down and get married, but can't because he's too good a journalist. They couldn't change that without ruining the story entirely so they were stuck with it - even for a woman. And bonus - the boring guy that Hildy ultimately rejects is Ralph Bellamy and she ends up with Cary Grant. Talk about a no-brainer.


• The Little Mermaid - Katha Pollitt and I vehemently disagree on this one. Pollitt thinks that just because the evil character Ursula sings about how mermaids don't need to talk to get a man, and ends up right, it proves that The Little Mermaid is sexist. Pollitt didn't watch the movie very carefully because the reason that Prince Eric resists Ariel in spite of the fact that he thinks she's pretty and he likes her personality is exactly because she can't talk - and in his first woozy encounter with Arial, after she saved his life, he remembers she was singing. But even without her voice, Arial manages to communicate with Eric. But also, her character is filled with intellectual curiosity - she's virtually a mermaid archeologist, with a collection of human artifacts that she tries to figure out. She becomes attracted to Eric while on one of her expeditions to the surface, in defiance of her father, who hates humans. And perhaps most importantly of all, she is driven by shameless lust. This is rare enough in any movie much less a Disney movie. And in fact you really get a sense of progress when you consider that the last Disney fairy tale animation before this one was Sleeping Beauty, in which the title character, well, slept through virtually the entire movie. What a difference from Ariel. People who think the Little Mermaid is sexist are all wet.


• Cassanova - was a delightful surprise. I rented this because I thought Heath Ledger was damnned cute, but I was prepared to grit my teeth through the interchangeable-sexbot view of women which I figured was inevitable with any story about Cassanova and wow, that was so not this movie! Instead the heroine is awesome - an 18th century proto-feminist philosopher. Cassanova falls in love with her and they end up on the road together as a traveling theatre troupe and the heroine becomes a playwright. Swoon. It's a total fantasy but so what? And on top of that, there's quite a bit of Catholic-church bashing throughout. Which makes this pretty much a perfect movie.

More non-misogynist romance movies to come...

Take back the Rom-Com

This article in Policy Mic addresses the issue of abortion in movies. I haven't seen "The Obvious Child" yet, and haven't heard anything about it that makes me want to run out and see it. Mostly what I've heard is that an abortion happens in it, and while I am certainly in favor of abortion rights, that alone isn't enough to make me want to see this "romantic comedy."

I do question what role an abortion has in a romantic comedy. Abortion in itself is not exactly conducive to either romance or comedy.

I definitely agree with the article in its disparagement of the way abortion is presented in Hollywood movies, but to a certain extent it's understandable. If you have to have an abortion, the one thing you don't want is dramatic complications resulting from it. So a typical abortion has nothing to recommend it to a storyline unless it does result in something awful happening, hence the reason that abortions in movies are so often related to come calamitous circumstance. Otherwise, if the abortion does not result in dramatic complications, why include it in the story line at all?

That said, I do like the concept of taking back the rom-com. As I've blogged about here many times, the problem with romantic comedies isn't that romance is being combine with comedy, the problem is that romance and comedy are being combined with misogyny. Rom-coms have been so abused by misogynists that people like the Bitter Gertrude blogger say things like:

I’ve long had the desire to fire every romantic comedy into the sun. I despise romcoms, and I never spent time figuring out why. Now that the answer is in my face, it’s undeniable: they’re one way we disseminate all of the worst ideas about relationships we have as a culture, including (especially) the male master narrative. What was once just an annoyance to me now looks like the worst kind of reprehensible irresponsibility. And that’s just one tiny corner of the art we produce. 

It’s easy to say, Oh, it’s just a play; it’s just a movie, etc. But there is no “just.” The narrative art form is POWERFUL. The human brain can experience narrative as if it’s happening in real life. The brain of a person telling a story and a person listening to that story experience neural coupling. Art is where we discuss who we are as a culture; our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our past, our imagined future. It’s the most important aspect of how our culture is created and how it is changed. Stories are the building blocks of culture, and we’re the ones who create and tell those stories.

There is nothing about the romantic comedy that is inherently misogynist. And in fact the classic movies like "His Girl Friday" and "The African Queen" are clearly compatible with feminism - a man and a woman work together well as equals - even if the message of the movies was not consciously intended to be feminist.

And what Bitter Gertrude cites as an example of "all of the worst ideas about relationships" is the hideous "Love Actually." But it's not like nobody was aware of how hideous that movie is - I was aware of it when I saw it in 2006, and A.O. Scott, the NYTimes critic, was when he called it out for for its misogyny back in 2003, although he doesn't explicitly call it misogyny:

It is disturbing to see Ms. (Emma) Thompson's range and subtlety so shamelessly trashed, and to see Laura Linney's intelligence similarly abused as a lonely, frustrated do-gooder. The fate of their characters suggests that women who are not young, pert secretaries or household workers have no real hope of sexual fulfillment and can find only a compromised, damaged form of love. Perhaps Mr. Curtis wishes to offer this as an insight into contemporary social arrangements; if so, his indifference to the cruelty of those arrangements is truly breathtaking. 

But it is unlikely that any particular insight was intended. Instead, ''Love Actually'' is a patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos, ending as it began, with hugging and kissing at the airport (where returning passengers are perhaps expressing their relief at being delivered from an in-flight movie like this one). The loose ends are neatly tied up, as they are when you seal a bag of garbage -- or if you prefer, rubbish.

I think Scott has hit on something when he says: "it is unlikely that any particular insight was intended."

I've seen the writer for the ugly anti-romantic web series "Compulsive Love" frequently write pro-women things in various social media - we are both members of a Facebook playwrights group and he and I share many mutual Facebook friends. And I'm sure he was shocked and appalled on reading the things I've said about his "romantic comedy" because he never considered what he had wrought - he never questioned for a moment whether what he was writing was actually "romantic" rather than the faux romantic comedy of the Apatow ouvre and its dude-bro copycats.

What's most disturbing to me about the new "romantic comedies" is that they seem to be a defensive maneuver on the part of the admirers of patriarchy. What these movies and the web series have in common is that the men are complete assholes - and yet they win the woman in the end. The Apatow movies are famous for portraying women as responsible uptight spoilsports (although of course, inevitably, incredibly hot and way out of the male protagonist's league) and the men as unattractive slobby man-babies. 

The protagonist in "Compulsive Love" is so repulsive that when he is beaten at a game of pool by a woman he refuses to honor his bet and instead prostitutes himself to pay off his debt.

I think that Compulsive Love took the dude-bro rom-com concept, unquestioningly, as what a romantic comedy should be and ran with it. The protagonist is very unattractive and yet in each week of the series ends up in bed with a new, out-of-his-league woman. And their relationship is entirely sexual (the real title should be "Compulsive Sex") and is broken up when the woman proves to have a personality quirk - or really a personality at all.

In the classic screwball romantic comedies the woman's quirky personality - such as Katherine Hepburn's character in "Bringing Up Baby" is part of the fun - and part of her charm. 

In the dude-bro "romantic comedies" the ideal woman has no personality and waits around for the unattractive man-baby to appreciate her. The woman in these misogynist romantic comedies are called "the because-um girl" by Sady Doyle and can be seen all the worst dude-bro rom-coms - including the execrable Talley's Folly.

The Policy Mic article mentions the movie "Knocked Up" - arguably the quintessential dude-bro rom-com and gets at something important about its sexual politics - the Kathryn Heigl character never considers abortion. And that's how the unattractive schlubby man-baby gets her in the long-term. That is the essence of the regressiveness of the dude-bro rom-com - pretending that women don't have all the hard-fought options we do have now. Woman can support themselves now - we don't need to trap a meal ticket into marriage - and women have control over their own bodies - if a woman is pregnant thanks to a sexual encounter, regrettable or non-consensual, she isn't doomed to spend the rest of her life being associated in some capacity with the horrible baby-daddy.

What these dude-bro rom-coms seem to be saying is this: "so lady, you want to see a story about a woman who ends up in a monogamous relationship with a MAN? Well stop believing those girly romantic comedies, where the man and woman come to a mutual and satisfying agreement on the issue of monogamy and desirability. In the real world if you want a man you will have to put up with his being a total asshole. And BTW, you better be hot - only the most attractive women have the honor of a monogamous relationship with a man, no matter how big an ugly loser he is."

I'd like to think my play JULIA & BUDDY is part of the movement to take back the rom-com from the dude-bros.