From Fred and Ginger to Jennifer
and Ashton, romantic comedies used to be one of the safest bets in Hollywood.
But it seems that rom is just not into com any more.
Is it the end for the romcom? You
can imagine the celebrity mag headlines: "Romcom's relationship on the
rocks?" "Com: I'm just not that into Rom" "Rom: Com doesn't
make me laugh any more."
After all, who says romance and
comedy go together like a horse and carriage? It seems to be a chiselled
Hollywood commandment that the two shall be forever conjoined in cinematic
matrimony, but perhaps it's time they went their separate ways. Sure, they got
off to a great start: in those early years it was all fun and games and
sparkling repartee, but recently they haven't quite looked the happy couple;
the spark just hasn't been there.
They've been stuck in the same
repetitive formula: boy meets girl, rom meets com, they all get along,
something gets in the way, it all looks in doubt at the end of the second act,
but then everyone remembers they've got to live happily ever after and pulls it
together again. It was great when you had stars like Cary Grant and Katharine
Hepburn, and classic directors like Ernst Lubitsch or Frank Capra or Preston
Sturges making it all tick behind the camera.
Even in the 1970s when the likes
of Woody Allen started asking difficult questions, the bond between rom and com
got stronger than ever. But now you've got Jennifer Aniston and Ashton Kutcher,
and a relentless flow of stories that either reheat the glory years or squander
their one good idea in a rush to beat the other movies who've also had it,
hence the glut of copycat set-ups like No Strings Attached/Friends With
Benefits, or The Bounty Hunter/One For The Money, or That Wedding Comedy Did
Well So Here's Another One.
No wonder they've been spending
more time apart. Rom has been hanging with the indie crowd, looking to recover
its edge with hip and heartfelt fare like In Search Of A Midnight Kiss, Before
Sunset, 500 Days Of Summer or, recently, Like Crazy. Either
that or it's been sucked into deadly earnest weepies where love spans
continents/generations/the challenged attention of a teenager, as in Nicholas
Sparks's movies (The Notebook, Dear John, etc), and lit-lite such
as The Time Traveler's Wife. If you're lucky, Channing Tatum will bump
into a lamppost but otherwise, the romance comes with tears of pain, not joy.
Com, meanwhile, has been hitting
the bong and hanging out with the guys far too much, hence the Judd Apatow
brand of "mostly com with a little bit of rom" (Knocked Up,
etc), the Frat Pack "rom's coming, run in the other direction!"
school, and the general rise of the bromance, where it's the chemistry between
the leading men that must be settled, while the woman waits patiently at the
altar. As last year's Bridesmaids showed, the women have grown tired of
waiting. Again, bad news for the romcom reconciliation.
Creatively and critically they're
on the skids, but commercially, the marriage is still convenient. More than any
other genre, romcoms are reliant on their stars. You don't go to see a film
like The Break-Up because you're interested in seeing Jennifer Aniston
play a Chicago art gallerist; you go because you want to see Jennifer Aniston
playing off Vince Vaughn. All right, not you, but people, generally. As such,
romcom is the genre that now attracts "basically playing themselves"
actors rather than "see how I disappear into the role" thespians; the
type of actors you find in the pages of celeb mags. It feels like putting the
carriage before the horse, but somehow the romcoms go on making money, no
matter how bad they get.
But don't give up hope! If the
history of romcoms was itself a romcom, right now we could just be in that
end-of-second act bit where all is lost and it looks like there's no hope of
them ever getting back together. We're pretending we haven't seen this a
thousand times before, but we all know what's supposed to happen next. And if
it doesn't, we want our money back.
Steve Rose
Full article: The Guardian
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