I’m not seeing a poster.

Completely OT, but did you see the most recent episode of Lie to Me? VERY interesting analysis of rape.

Wait, this is a real movie? Someone linked to the trailer for it on the Onion; I’ve been under the impression that it was a joke. A spot-on hoax like the Disney Sarah Palin movie trailer.

Guess I was wrong.

they venture out to romantic comedies only if they’re slightly smarter ones, which is something Judd Apatow is making a fortune off of.

Wait, what?

* Men are cold, unfeeling creatures that just want sex and nothing more.  Women cannot change this, so we have to accept it.  For some reason, just abandoning men altogether if they suck this much doesn’t occur to anyone.

Exactly.  I cannot say I was above this, god knows in college I put up with a lot from guys who should have never been worth my time but whenever they did anything “nice” for me it was like an endorphin explosion in my brain and I just kept plugging away only to be hurt and humiliated. Don’t do that shit anymore though.

I also think these movies play into the same religuous devotion right wing nuts are always pushing, the “if you just pray hard enough” meme. If you’re praying to god on your knees every night for 100 days and nothing happens and you stop well, then maybe it would have been that one extra day where god listened and gave you want you want. I would say it’s the same attitude for a lot of women, the “maybe this time” desire to continue, when, in fact, women should be dropping guys like this and not bothering.

“Someone linked to the trailer for it on the Onion; I’ve been under the impression that it was a joke”

The onion does host ads for real companies and websites that are pretty decent in what they offer.

Marc’s theory as we contemplated this poster was an interesting one—-smart, independent women that don’t buy into this crap are a growing demographic, and said women have given up on romantic comedies.  They’re a big part of the audience for prestige pictures, and they venture out to romantic comedies only if they’re slightly smarter ones, which is something Judd Apatow is making a fortune off of.

This is an interesting theory in light of an article on film marketing in last week’s New Yorker. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s the relevant excerpt:

An unexpected corollary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer have time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn’t expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film’s budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it). They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most “review-sensitive”: a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiot. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them, but they’re hard to motivate. “Guys only get off their couches twice a year, to go to ‘Wild Hogs’ or ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ ” the marketing consultant Terry Press says. “If all you have is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

A few conclusions: first, Hollywood’s “collective wisdom” sucks (the main point of the article, and nothing surprising to anyone familiar with the film industry); second, it looks like “older” men aren’t the only ones refusing to get off their couches for formula dreck second; and third, if they replaced the terms “younger” and “older” in their quadrants with “mindless” and “smart,” they might more easily achieve their goal of colouring in two (or more) of the boxes.

Count me among the demographic of women who has no truck with romantic comedies (and I never really have; my first real experience with one was “You’ve Got Mail,” and I could not have been more bored or unimpressed). In addition to everything you elaborated on in this post, let’s face it: rom coms simply suck.

At least we can take some comfort in the knowledge that New in Town, another POS rom-com with Renee Zellweger, didn’t even crack the top five in its opening weekend.  I’m really hoping Confessions of a Shopaholic meets the same fate, because it’s been a while since a movie trailer has filled with me with such unreasonable rage.

One thing we also need to keep in mind is that these movies also serve to cater to an audience that wants to be reassured that true happiness comes from having a husband and family.  Meaning sure this women is a high powered executive/lawyer/doctor but what they really want is to be just like you and have a husband and not a career.  So it helps not just reinforce stereotypes but as a balm for those who feel wisful for what they may have given up.

It happens for men too in rom coms that aren’t specifically aimed at women, Nicolas Cage in “The Family Man” (though in the end of the film he still gets to be a high powered exec), Ben Affleck in “Jersey Girl”.

Gena-

They seem to be so worried about Confessions of a Shopaholic that they “leaked” the fact that the first ad for the Prince of Persia movie is in the film.  The fact no one really cares about the Prince of Persia movie seems to have alluded them.

Count me among the demographic of women who has no truck with romantic comedies (and I never really have; my first real experience with one was “You’ve Got Mail,” and I could not have been more bored or unimpressed). In addition to everything you elaborated on in this post, let’s face it: rom coms simply suck.

So are there any that don’t suck, in the collective wisdom of the Pandagonite XX crowd?

Absolutely right on. Apatow has been capitalizing on the soft bigotry of low expectations. Instead of being completely unwatchable, as it looked like it should have been, the 40 YO virgin was occasionally mildly amusing and only painfully bad about half the time. The mileage he’s gotten off that formula is a pretty remarkable indictment of the state of romantic comedies today.

Punch Drunk Love might be the only romantic comedy I’ve ever liked. Though the definition of “romantic comedy” has to be pretty broad for it to fit.

I’m an “older woman”, who knew.

I was passing by the theater near my husband’s store (a very upscale shopping district) and saw no less than three posters for wedding themed movies.  None of them looked like something I would watch even if I were paid to.  I had two thoughts, first that backlash is the father of all shitty media, and second that the message of these films was probably a lot less important than convincing women to buy Prada and other designer crap.  I think they should just move the theater seats right inside the Sephora and the Macy’s and cut out the middle man.

Ooh, I didn’t see PIATOR ask

So are there any that don’t suck, in the collective wisdom of the Pandagonite XX crowd?

Amelie, A Good Year, and No Reservations.  I was able to sit through all three of these without wanting to punch someone.

One thing we also need to keep in mind is that these movies also serve to cater to an audience that wants to be reassured that true happiness comes from having a husband and family.  Meaning sure this women is a high powered executive/lawyer/doctor but what they really want is to be just like you and have a husband and not a career.

Word.  I might add:  a lot of these movies are “date movies” and are seen by het couples.  I can’t shake the feeling that there is a little Backlash action going on—the guys seeing these with their girlfriends or wives can get a get a little thrill from watching professional women being taken down a peg or two.  It’s easier to justify the rage at the ambitious woman down at the office being promoted ahead of them.  They can tell themselves that deep down, all women are suckers for the male approval that comes with marriage and babies.

The fact no one really cares about the Prince of Persia movie seems to have alluded them.

Not only that, but according to Hollywood, the key demographic for Confessions of a Shopaholic wouldn’t see a movie like Prince of Persia anyway, except maybe to see Jake Gyllenhaal shirtless.  This is why movies like that are marketed as “the women’s alternative” to whatever the big special effects extravaganza is being released at around the same time.  I remember reading in at least three different media outlets that the Sex and the City movie was “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the ladies.”  As in, compensation for this big, loud stinky boy movie taking up all the attention.  There’s a Sandra Bullock comedy coming out soon called All About Steve that sounds absolutely dreadful, and happens to be scheduled to be released the same weekend as Watchmen.  You can bet that its selling point is “Well, women don’t see movies like Watchmen, we need something for them.”  This woman does, and I have no doubt a lot of others do too.  I just get so tired of Hollywood making this shit over and over again simply because they’re supposedly the kind of movies women want to see.  I don’t know who to blame more, the filmmakers or the women who actually do waste money on them.

Well, in one sense the market for these movies is women in East Backlash, but in another the market is male or male-identified studio executives. So the current crop may give us a better idea about their personal anxieties than about those of the people who are or aren’t going to see them.

Huh, though, the New Yorker article is making me think which demographics were associated with recent movie choices. I just saw Taken, young male with a little older male appeal. Not recommended.
I second Amelie for good romantic comedies, though. And am adding Shaun of the Dead, although it is more horror/comedy - touted as a “romantic zombedy” so therefore it counts. I personally liked Love Actually, but wouldn’t put it on a list of “good movies for feminism.”

Punch Drunk Love has some pretty ugly stereotypes of ball-busting women and hen-pecked men (of the sister-brother relationship variety), but it’s a weird, lovely, creepy, and oddly touching charming little movie. And I find PTA’s more widely praised movies (Magnolia, The Wahlberg porn thing) kind of overrated.

I think the romantic comedy as a genre has always been problematic.  They require superior writing as well as superb acting skills, which generally seems to be lacking in most cases.
And even the classics of the genre from “Some Like it Hot”, “The Phildelphia Story” to “Pretty Woman” or “Bridget Jones’ Diary” are full of sexist portrayals of women.

Hekie, it’s not a perfect rule but I’ve generally found there’s a pretty strong inverse relationship between the quality of a film and the degree to which it’s crafted and marketed for a particular gender.

Amelie, A Good Year, and No Reservations.  I was able to sit through all three of these without wanting to punch someone.

Well, that’s 1 out of 3 - I’ll have to check out the other 2.

“10 Things I Hate About You”? “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”?

What about “Juno”?  I consider it a romantic comedy that wasn’t total crap.

I kinda feel like a Republican when the topic turns to romantic comedies; I’ve got exactly one answer to the question, and I use it every time Imagine Me & You. It’s better than tax cuts on the rich though, I promise! For one thing it’s got two women as the One True Pairing and manages to avoid or skewer many of the Rules discussed in the last rom-com thread here. Also, it’s kind of nice to have a gay movie that’s not totally serious and dark and gritty. It’s a light fluffy rom-com, just, y’know, with two women. Not entirely flawless: Pay no attention to Piper Perabo’s accent please.

Hey, y’all are missing the visual cue in the poster.  What happens when their hearts are united?  Blowjob.

““Bridget Jones’ Diary” are full of sexist portrayals of women.
“

It was written by a woman let’s not forget that as was Confessions of a Call Girl. I think that is the name of the proper show with Billie Piper playing the call girl.

I thought _Amelie_ was the quintessential Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie… and hence on the feminist shitlist because it presumes that the good woman is all quirks and intuition.

Is it actually possible to achieve a consensus on what would make a feminist movie?  Even the Bechdel Test yields movies that put women at the center of the action, but not necessarily women who make feminist choices—and it’s devilishly difficult to figure out what to make of a movie where an appealing (and perhaps feminist-friendly) character ends badly:  are we supposed to relish that she’s being punished, or are we supposed to lament that she’s being abused and scapegoated by a world that’s arrayed against her? 

Of course the whole thing’s a mess in part because there’s such a massive weight of tradition bolstering the idea that a Happy Ending entails a straight marriage.

Word.  I might add:  a lot of these movies are “date movies” and are seen by het couples.

The way romantic themed movies have been marketed by Hollywood and the larger pop culture has seemed to be geared toward women and then hetero dating couples. 

Out of curiosity, how does Jane Eyre and Emma stack up to these modern romantic themed movies?

here’s utter crap in all genres.

FTW! And people wonder why I am so hesitant to pay $11+ to go see what’s in the movie theaters…...

PIATOR, I also like Gilbert Grape, but didn’t think it was necessarily a romantic comedy. 10 Things was problematic, likely because The Taming of the Shrew isn’t exactly feminist. The Julia Stiles character sometimes ventures into that conservative-talking-points-portrayal of uppity women. But then, it was for teenagers, so it might be wrong to expect anything too far beyond conventional

Oh, how about Truly, Madly, Deeply? That was like Ghost for thinking people.

I agree with liz about 10 things, but it’s still a better movie than any Apatow project I’ve seen

“The Truth about Cats and Dogs” isn’t bad.  It’s really Cyrano de Bergerac done modern, but while both women want the boy, and the boy is taken by the beauty on the outside at first, it’s the inner person that matters in the end.

I’m actually looking forward to the near future and the end of the studio system entirely.  It’s getting easier and easier for people to create music and videos and stream them on the net.  We’re not going to need a studio system for distribution, which means 24 y/o idiots with a BA in “Cinema” can’t get in between directors and actors and screenwriters and say stupid shit like “This movie needs to appeal more to X demographic”.

More original stories that are truer to the author/director’s intent.  If the author/director sucks, so will their movies.  And people will choose better fare.

Right now, studios are more concerned with attaching big name stars and jousting with each other over which weekend belongs to them.  None of that has anything to do with making a compelling story.

Years ago, Gene Siskel sent one of his flunkies out to interview people before the opening of “Alien 3” asking what we expected from the summer blockbusters.  I thought it an odd question, b/c it wouldnt’ be a blockbuster if it wasn’t a good movie, would it?  My response:  “I want to be entertained.”

I said more about enjoying what a strong female character Ripley was, and how I enjoyed how the genre had been turned on its head with the previous sequel.  Gene, who wasn’t there with the camera, cut the rest of my interview out and prefaced me as such:

“College kids are home for the summer and just want to check their brains at the door [cue me] “I want to be entertained.”“

Thanks, Gene.  I was even still in my suit cause I went to the movies after work. 

He went on to talk about how “Alien 3” was going to be a big blockbuster b/c it exploded real good.  It wasn’t b/c it SUCKED ass, special effects be damned.

I thought _Amelie_ was the quintessential Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie… and hence on the feminist shitlist because it presumes that the good woman is all quirks and intuition.

Of course, even “Kissing Jessica Stein” has elements of that.

I’m not a fan of the “Romantic Comedy’ genre because it’s so often LCD. I like romantic movies, but the thing is, a romance is going to be different things for different people. And one person’s touching romance will be another person’s dumb movie.

So for me…

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for two reasons. First, for Carey’s portrayal of hesitant, unsure love. Second, for showing how we can all fuck up in love and get through it.

Second, and here’s where it gets a bit sketchy..The Lake House. Yes, that Reeves/Bullock movie. Yes, the one with the time travel. However, the time travel was, IMO a well done frame for what is the best portrayal of a long-distance relationship I’ve ever seen in a movie. And as that’s a large part of my experience…it worked for me.

Third (and Fourth), the same type of movie. Playing by Heart and Love, Actually. Both, for the main reason of being a melting pot of love, so to speak, and showing different strokes for different folks.

Out of curiosity, how does Jane Eyre and Emma stack up to these modern romantic themed movies?

Much, much better—granted, they’re classic works written by master writers, not what someone else has so eloquently phrased as romcom mad libs.  And assuming that you’re speaking of books or the better adaptations, and not what happens to those characters and stories once Hollywood gets its hands on them.

Because of the time in which they are set, the happy endings are marriages, true, but it’s shown very clearly that marriage is about the only option that respectable women of upper and middle classes have of not slipping into grinding poverty.  There isn’t the added layer of crap, where we’re meant to believe that successful, supposedly happy women are really under it all, deeply unhappy and pining away for a man the way that most modern romcoms seem to operate.

Um, I’m love Jane Eyre and most of Jane Austen’s novels, so, I’m going to stop myself here, before you get a treatise.

And don’t shoot me, but I really like Something’s Gotta Give, with Diane Keaton.

Screw it, I’m going to out myself as a lover of romantic comedies.  Saved, The Devil Wears Prada, Center State, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Stepford Wives (though I think it worked better as a horror), Stardust, Juno, and Ever After are all in my movie collection.  I also went and watch “Hitch” and didn’t think it was terrible.

I agree.  I haven’t seen half of those, but I also tend to like the romantic comedy genre.  I like fluffy movies that entertain me.  I tend to not actually see things at the theater (small children and high ticket prices mean I don’t get to go), but when I get a movie, I usually don’t go for the ‘intelligent’ movies.  I don’t like horror, I don’t like (much) drama, quirky gets on my nerves unless its really well done, and action is mostly boring (again, unless its really well done).  I want an easy movie that will kill a couple of hours and make me laugh.  Romantic comedies do that for me.  If I want to use my brain while I’m being entertained, I’ll read a book.

And that isn’t any kind of judgment about those who like movies and want them to be smart.  I get that everybody has their own tastes.  I just prefer books and only use movies for cheap escapism.

Also, the whole point of Jane Eyre was that Jane was to be raised up and Mr. Rochester was to be brought down so that they could meet as equals. Unlike modern Rom Coms, which just have the women being taken down.

I don’t mind the occasional Rom Com, but most of them are just complete trash.

I like Austen too, and most of the works pass the “strong, complex women” test—especially, Karinna, as you point out, with the emphasis on how a “prudent” woman needs to understand that marriage is at least as much for security as it is for twue wuv.  But one quality that’s still kind of bothersome (aside from the notorious focus on the idle rich) is how extremely non-sex-positive they are.  Think about how everyone reacts to Lydia Bennet’s shocking behavior in running off _not_ to get married.  That’s chiefly an aspect of the era, sure, but there _were_ women writing then who were more radical about sex and pleasure as well as independence and thoughtfulness.  More evidence, perhaps, of how it’s so hard to get all the moving parts into place to make unambiguously feminist works, literary or cinematic.

FlipYrWhig, I think Jane Austen did feminist rom coms pretty damn well, especially considering the time. You have (typically) an intelligent, well-thought out heroine who, through high jinks, misunderstandings, and lots of social pressure eventually winds up with the good guy. Yet, not once does she fall into lame gender stereotypes, every major character is fully realized, and they totally win the Bechdel test a lot.

I like a few rom coms, but not many. I do consider any Jane Austen to be fundamentally a rom com, and I’m also a fan of Love, Actually and, I agree, Something’s Gotta Give.

Guilty admission: I actually enjoyed 27 Dresses.

I’m gonna reach wayy back to the 80s and point out that Protocol with Goldie Hawn was a pretty progressive rom com, and still one of my favorite movies. Also combines romance with political wonkery.  Perhaps not so good in the portrayal of Muslim/Arabic characters, though more textured than your average episode of 24.

Private Benjamin, too, actually (not a rom-com?). Goldie had a good run of girl-power movies for a bit.

(we will not speak of Overboard, which is fucked up in so many ways that you could teach a whole class on it).

Recently, it’s a lot harder. I simply cannot deal with Meg Ryan, and for a while there you could not find a romantic movie without her in the middle of it, crinkling her nose and looking Perky or Confused (her only two expressions). I liked While You Were Sleeping; Sandra Bullock didn’t get taken down a peg *or* swept away by a prince, she just fell for the wrong guy then met the right one.

I loathe, from the bottom of my heart, Bridget Jones and its ilk, which I find deeply insulting and inane. I do not think “cute but insecure and somewhat dim girl gets repeatedly humiliated but eventually finds a nice dude” a worthwhile storyline.

Roxanne wasn’t bad, but Darryl Hannah really didn’t have much to do in it, though Shelley Duval was rather awesome.

Does Dave count? I thought Sigourney was good and funny in that.

Why are romantic comedies getting uglier over time?

I don’t think they get uglier over time. They just get uglier between the months of January and May, which is when all the crappy movies are released.

@ Ashley—I know I’m being a weasel to nitpick Jane Freakin’ Austen, but IMHO there are a lot of gender stereotypes that remain intact, most persistently the one that says that the man has to be the one to declare interest, which leaves even Austen’s plucky and sympathetic heroines doing a lot of the Regency equivalent of waiting by the phone.  There are (a few) wilder, more assertive women in novels before Austen’s era, so I like to make sure that that earlier generation gets a little credit too.  But I’m straying from the conventions of romantic comedy.  When it comes to romantic comedy, Austen is the quintessence, and it’s about as feminist as it’s going to get.

emjaybee:  I liked While You Were Sleeping;

Whoo-hoo!  I spoke up in defense of that movie on the last romcom thread!  *clinks emjaybee’s glass*

Oh, I forgot Sliding Doors; like a rom-com episode of Twilight Zone, very enjoyable.

It’s been a long time since I saw _Four Weddings and a Funeral_, but I remember liking that a lot.  How does that hold up over time?

Love, Actually.

As slickly manipulative of its audience as a bug zapper.  I like it, but every time I see it I can’t help suspecting that there is a vast, cool and unsympathetic intelligence behind it with a near-perfect algorithm for playing on human emotion.

Mark my words, we’ll find one day that Richard Curtis is a sociopathic serial killer or something.

I’m confused. Shouldn’t the female outline’s heart be in, uh, her HEART as opposed to her brain? As in, relationships to women are about feeling more than thinking, while the male outline, why, of course men are about the lust.  Of course, I have no idea what the plot actually entails.

FlipYrWhig-

I guess I hadn’t really considered the sex negativism in Austen—I sort of lumped it in with the “part of the times” category, along with restrictive gender roles, a pretty rigid class system, etc.  Even with that said, I don’t know that I’d necessarily consider Austen to be a feminist, or even all that progressive for her time, Persuasion not withstanding.  Or does the fact that she writes compelling, well-rounded female characters, regardless of her own personal politics, make her proto-feminist?

Though in an era of no reliable birth control, I can kind of understand a more negative attitude towards sex, and particularly sex outside of a way to support any resulting children.  Which explains part of the reason for the hullabaloo over Lydia and Wickham’s “elopement”—Wickham intends to abandon Lydia, and I don’t think he’d care about any child he might have stuck her with.

Ack, time to do D&D;.

Of course, I have no idea what the plot actually entails.

Watch the trailer on YouTube. Not only will you find out the plot, you’ll have watched the whole movie ... in under 2.5 minutes ... for free.

“And worse, that they’re devouring actresses whose main appeal is that they seem intelligent and like they should really be above this shit.”

Maybe they really are *not* intelligent and are *not* above the shit. That would seem to be the obvious conclusion.

I gave up on romcoms a long time ago. Underworld 3 has a tragic romance and an interesting anti-hero. No humor, though, and a strong heroine. I watched this in close succession with waitress, where the heroine made all these shitty choices and it was supposed to be comic: had a baby passively, with an abusive hubby; had an affair with a married man, had the baby and instantly bonded and fell in love with it, got saved by a fairy godfather, and evidently had no swelling, bloating, tenderness, sleep deprivation, depression, Post partum anything, and so forth. She ended the movie in another pastel-colored waitress uniform, baking pies—-in short, doing something traditional for women—-and with a perfectly-behaved toddler. Kids are only bad when they’re other womens’, evidently. I’ll stick with tragic werewolves and kick ass warrior vampires, even if there’s other problems.

Oh, and a good light mainstream romantic comedy? Broadcast News.

Good romantic comedy? Jeffrey.

But it’s gay, about 15 years old, and deals with AIDS.  So, it might not fit what other folks are talking about.  I also love Bedrooms and Hallways because it plays with gender and sexual boundaries.

Yeah, but BNews has got another driven career woman who’s presented as being unfulfilled without a man, hopelessly in love with a dipshit who she’s too good for, and doesn’t she wind up alone?

I swear, I had such high hopes for the first Bridget Jones movie, because the best line of all was, “I like you just the way you are.” And then the movie was pretty horrible, but then again Helen Fielding buys into all those cliches about single women, or at best doesn’t know how to satirize them very well.

Adam and Steve. Ha!

Rom coms lean more heavily on writing than other genres. Given Hollywood’s tendency to write, focus-group, re-write and re-write again, most rom coms have a distinct authorship-by-committee flavor.

Group authorship is even more common in television, of course, but the the writers work together rather than in series and there is much less time for producers and others to perform mayhem on the script.

Yeah, but BNews has got another driven career woman who’s presented as being unfulfilled without a man, hopelessly in love with a dipshit who she’s too good for, and doesn’t she wind up alone?

Jane’s not presented (at least not by the writer/director) as being unfulfilled without a man. And as I recall it, it was less love than lust and passion between her and Tom. And she does wind up alone (or at least not married), but it’s a happy ending—for all the characters. It’s a movie that is clearly written with an audience of grown-ups in mind.

Even so, Broadcast News is frothy and light and hews to a lot of the dusty rom-com tropes (e.g. love triangle, loathing turns to love/lust, comic banter). And it still manages to be original and surprising. And this was a big studio project, not an art house (i.e. indie) picture. That’s what happens when you have a talented writer like Brooks doing the movie instead of hacks doing write-by-numbers from the Big Book of Movie Marketability.

You really have to have a good grasp of her time and place to really appreciate Austen; a lot of her writing is actually satire of the mores and to some extent, literature of the time. The restrictions women faced when she was alive are almost unimaginable to most of us here. Her genius was in treading the line so delicately and in writing women characters who were (to me anyway) entirely believable and distinct human beings. But a great deal of what’s revolutionary about her is simply that while pretending to write light romantic comedies, she was actually stating the grim realities women faced when they were entirely dependent on good marriages to survive.

Tell me, where is fancy bred?
In the crotch or in the head?

@ emjaybee:  All true, but IMHO Austen’s take is also a step _backwards_ (as far as pleasure and empowerment and willingness to upset the system) by comparison to something like the scandal or amatory fiction that was being written a century before her works.  And she’s also a step backwards from Mary Wollstonecraft, but that’s OK, because Mary Wollstonecraft was pretty much setting the leftmost boundary for possible feminism in her life and works.  So I do want to give Austen all kinds of credit, but not _so_ much credit that we also ignore that there were progressive and liberal feminists who were her rough contemporaries.

This is a great way to break up Super Bowl Sunday!  Thanx all!

“But a great deal of what’s revolutionary about her is simply that while pretending to write light romantic comedies, she was actually stating the grim realities women faced when they were entirely dependent on good marriages to survive.”

Yup.  Like that scene in <u>Pride and Prejudice</u> where the jackass cousin Collins rolls up to take his pick of the daughters.  It’s ostensibly played for laughs, but one of the girls submitting to the unwanted and inadvisable match is theoretically the only way any unmarried female family members aren’t going to wind up living in a ditch in the woods upon their father’s death.  And even then, it’s only a guarantee for the girl who marries him; it’s socially expected, but there’s no requirement that he support any spinster sisters-in-law he winds up with.  Austen does keep drawing the curtains back when she has things like “What the fuck is going to happen to them all if their father dies before they’re married?” sharing space with “Will Elizabeth be able to land Mr. Darcy now that she’s discovered he’s not the total prick she thought he was?”.

It kind of reminds me of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, where the window-dressing is comedy but the bedrock is how utterly boned the women are if they can’t get and keep a male patron.  Most thoroughly hosed is the woman who believes in the idea of good and proper society and keeping within its mores; being unattractive and insufficiently servile has landed her in desperate straits and rendered her pretty much invisible to that society.

I’m confused. Shouldn’t the female outline’s heart be in, uh, her HEART as opposed to her brain? As in, relationships to women are about feeling more than thinking, while the male outline, why, of course men are about the lust.  Of course, I have no idea what the plot actually entails

That’s a great point.  I guess they want to demonstrate that neither gender’s heart is in the right place.  Men are lustful animals and women are calculating bitches.  Which you’d think would mean that women should be in charge of shit but through the magic of the Patriarchy, men get to be the Masters Of The Universe when it comes to running shit AND emotionally stunted horndogs where love and sex are concerned.

So are there any that don’t suck, in the collective wisdom of the Pandagonite XX crowd?

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for When Harry Met Sally.  Not for any particularly feminist reasons or anything, I just think it’s a touch more clever than the stuff that’s been released in the intervening 20-odd years.

I’m confused. Shouldn’t the female outline’s heart be in, uh, her HEART as opposed to her brain? As in, relationships to women are about feeling more than thinking, while the male outline, why, of course men are about the lust.

I know, it’s a bad analogy, since it would seem to mean either women’s brains rule their hearts, which we all KNOW is untrue: women are irrational creatures ruled by emotion, or that men’s hearts rule their dicks, which we all KNOW is untrue: men are beasts who will fuck anyone, anytime, anywhere, given the slightest incentive.

Four Weddiongs is great b/c at the beginning Hugh Grant gives his “great” best man speech which concludes with him saying he’s in awe of people making such a commitment b/c he never could.  Andie McDowell liked him, but when she heard that, decided he was only good for fun sex and went on looking for a committed relationship elsewhere. 

She still liked him even when she was engaged, but he could never actually tell her he loved her.  He sort of quoted David Partridge, but not quite.  She called him on it, and he just flutters about it and stumbles off.

It’s not till he actually says he’s in love with another woman (doing exactly what she told him—answer every question with “I do”) that she really gives him a chance.

It reverses much of the typical trope since he’s the one pining away for the perfect love, and she’s not willing to waste away waiting for him to figure out how to commit.

Still good.

most persistently the one that says that the man has to be the one to declare interest, which leaves even Austen’s plucky and sympathetic heroines doing a lot of the Regency equivalent of waiting by the phone.

Then again, back then, especially in the social set that Austen was writing about, that’s how it worked.  From what I understand, outside feminist/lefty/bohemian circles, that’s how it works even now.  I don’t know a single straight couple where the woman asked the man to marry her.  I’m big on making the first move, asking men out, paying at least some of the time, and being assertive in hetero contexts.  I’m still not sure I would ask a man to marry me.

Maybe they really are *not* intelligent and are *not* above the shit. That would seem to be the obvious conclusion.

I think the bottom line is that being an actor is a job, and they will take work as they can get it.  Especially because most young Hollywood starlets have a very short shelf life.  Comparatively few actresses are able to gracefully age into older roles, and there aren’t a lot of said roles to go around, anyway. 

Not to mention that an actress who decided to only take on feminist roles, or only work on films with a feminist message, would find herself pounding the pavement in about two seconds flat.  There just aren’t that many feminist-approved movies being made nowadays.

Though most actors will take work where they can get it, regardless of whether they’re young starlets or not.  There are probably less than 20 film actors on the planet who actually have a real choice about what kind of movies they want to do, or what kinds of characters they want to portray.

the jackass cousin Collins rolls up to take his pick of the daughters.

Not to mention that, when Elizabeth’s friend (whose name I’m forgetting) goes for Collins, isn’t it pretty much stated outright that she’s marrying him because she’s no great catch and this is her only chance at not ending up in a ditch someday herself? 

I don’t think any modern romcom would every have even a tertiary (sympathetic) character who openly admitted to marrying someone because she had to, not because it was Twue Wuv.  I mean, aside from negative portrayals of people who are meant to be gold-diggers and the like.

I don’t think any modern romcom would every have even a tertiary (sympathetic) character who openly admitted to marrying someone because she had to, not because it was Twue Wuv.  I mean, aside from negative portrayals of people who are meant to be gold-diggers and the like.

Not exactly a sympathetic portrayal, and not exactly a rom-com, but Rose’s mom in Titanic has a line where she asks her daughter if she wants to see her being reduced to taking in sewing.

Oh sorry, you said modern and Titanic isn’t.

“Not to mention that, when Elizabeth’s friend (whose name I’m forgetting) goes for Collins, isn’t it pretty much stated outright that she’s marrying him because she’s no great catch and this is her only chance at not ending up in a ditch someday herself?”

Yeah, pretty much.  She’s better than he is, but her family’s social standing isn’t high, and she’s getting a bit long in the tooth for a marriageable woman at the time.  Elizabeth asks her if she really wants to do it, and it’s basically one of those “I don’t see too many other options, do you?” responses.  When Elizabeth goes to stay with the married couple later on, she finds that Charlotte has <strike>deliberately</strike> just so happened to have arranged her own space in the house so as to keep her husband out of it as much as possible.

As far as “good” romcoms, I don’t know that I can think of many, but my dad absolutely LOVED Kate and Leopold and watched it a million times. 

It deals with the “job or guy” issue in an interesting way.  (I really HATE that plot point, because if I were to be faced with the choice of job or guy, I would choose the job easily.  That was one thing I really just absolutely hated about The Devil Wears Prada.  Can’t she decide whether she likes her job without some whiny dude trying to convince her so?)  Not to give away the whole story, but you know, the whole time travel element does make things a lot more difficult and either/or.  It’s not like some whiny dude said, “Choose me or the career!” 

I mean, I would still choose the job.  Even over Hugh Jackman.  Sorry, Hugh. 

And yeah, you can poke holes in some of the science and whatever, but IT’S A ROMCOM.  Come on. 

But I generally hate those movies just because I hate predictable movies, and they are almost always SO PREDICTABLE.  Come on, Hollywood—SURPRISE ME.  Even a little.  The only reason I was satisfied with Titanic was that a lead dies.  But then of course other movies started following that trend and it wasn’t interesting anymore.  But it’s still mostly satisfying to me when a main character does actually die ...

Posted too soon.  The end of that is “And the sympathy is still completely with her, as he’s just as much an ass as he was pre-marriage, but she’s at least fulfilling to the letter the wifely duties of the time.  He got precisely what he paid for—a very good wife-as-appliance—but she’s got to put up with him in exchange for having any sort of future at all.”

@ Kaninchen: Hey, are you a Troper?! I’ve never come across another one online before…

*waves* I’m a Troper. Same name there as here.

Gracchus, I’m still ‘meh’ on BN, if only because I seem to remembmber HH being somehow more impressed with what’s his face than vice versa. That fits in with another thing I hate about romantic comedies or whatever: the way women long for, obsess over, orwhatever some guy from afar. The guys are always these wonderful prizes that don’t even know they exist, and the women are all Cinderellas who need prince charming to make them feel like they exist.

I hated, hated, hated Waitress. What a load of crap that was. Heroine passively continuing on a pregnancy she doesn’t want? That’s a recipe for successful motherhood right there. Heroine just keeps on living this shitty life until rescued by magical love for baby and a timely Fairy Godfather? Wow, can we say Deus ex machina? Also, she has some great pregnancy; no bloating, swelling, gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, leaking breasts, PPD, and she falls in love with her baby just like that.  Also, no lack of sleep, no difficulty afterward with the kid——that only befalls unworthy mothers, evidently, one of which the movie shows us, and of course she doesn’t look like Keri Russell——in fact, Keri Russell has a magical motherhood, no baby weight, and the toddler afterward is miraculously cute! Why, it’s just like a guidebook on motherhood. God, I hated that fucking movie. 

Don’t even get me started on the new Renee Zellweger piece of crap.  It’s so hard to find a movie that doesn’t amount to, “Uppity woman gets her ass kicked down to size for love,” with a laughtrack. Even one I like—-“Something New”, with Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker as an inter-racial couple—-features a drive career woman who lets the guy change her.  He doesn’t do any changing for her, not that I think that ought to be an option. Look, you love somebody or you don’t. The transformation scene that’s so big a feature in romcoms just drives me up the wall, especially the one where the heroine gets a makeover, and the hero suddenly likes her. She should boot his sorry ass over the moon because he’s a shallow SOB who should have liked her before.

Titanic has a line where she asks her daughter if she wants to see her being reduced to taking in sewing.

Except of course that I’m pretty sure this is meant to imply that Rose’s mother is a crassly materialistic (and/or insufficiently romantic) traditionalist from an outrageously cloistered social world, which Rose is desperate to escape.  I think the conversation takes place as her mother is lacing her into a corset, which is nicer visual symbolism than you usually get in that sort of movie. 

The message doesn’t seem to be that Rose really ought to marry this guy, and of course Rose rebels and (presumably) doesn’t marry him.

Anyone here NOT seen Antonia’s Line?

@ Opop:  Yes, it did work that way (re: women waiting for the men’s first moves), but some non-Austen writers were willing to challenge that, at least in fiction.  Mary Hays was one.  A lot of the Wollstonecraft/Godwin circle advocated women’s greater sexual freedom as well as questioning marriage as a patriarchal system.  Then again, just about nobody reads Mary Hays now, and the reviewers hated her books, so maybe Austen had the right idea.

The Conformist! I laughed, I cried, I learned a little something!

I mean, I would still choose the job.

I can’t imagine a lot of people who wouldn’t choose the job.  I mean maybe if it was a really shite job and a shot at something better came along with the guy?  I’m one of those total idiots who once moved cross-country for a guy (both stupidest and best thing I ever did), but there were a lot of reasons aside from the guy that it was a good move for me.  For starters, I was trading Bumfuck, Louisiana, for New York City, which is hard to pass up even if there’s no romantic attachment involved.

Romance is fleeting.  Work is forever.  I suppose it’s unromantic of me to say so, but there you go.

Also @ Opop:  Charlotte in P&P;really is a clever character, precisely because Collins is SO insufferable, and she knows it, and she doesn’t grow to love him or some such thing.  She utterly prefers to be separate from him even when they’re sharing a home.  She just makes the best deal possible and moves on.  Ruthless!

A lot of the Wollstonecraft/Godwin circle advocated women’s greater sexual freedom as well as questioning marriage as a patriarchal system.

Sure, people advocated change.  But if you’re writing a novel about how people actually are, and trying to portray the world or a certain aspect of it fairly, you can’t just decide “oh, well, I think Jane Bennet would just ask Whatshisface to marry her rather than waiting around for him to say something!”  Not if you want to end up with a good book, anyway. 

If anything, what Austen did (portray the system as it was, but with a wink and a nudge) is the difference between good political art and propaganda.  Though I’m not familiar with Hays’s work.

Except of course that I’m pretty sure this is meant to imply that Rose’s mother is a crassly materialistic (and/or insufficiently romantic) traditionalist from an outrageously cloistered social world, which Rose is desperate to escape.  I think the conversation takes place as her mother is lacing her into a corset, which is nicer visual symbolism than you usually get in that sort of movie.

I still think it’s an entirely more sympathetic view than you will usually see in a movie of what motivates women to be “golddiggers”.

Bingley!  “Whatshisface” should be Bingley! 

Am I right?  Man, I am really betraying my lack of intimate knowledge of Pride and Prejudice...

Women don’t really like sex that much; they just tolerate it to lure unwilling men into pretending to care about us.

If a man believes this, maybe it’s because he’s just not good at sex.  If a woman believes this, maybe it’s because she’s never had sex with a guy who’s good at it.  This isn’t surprising, considering that if a man assumes the woman won’t like it anyway, why would he even bother trying?  Unfortunately, I’ve had plenty of cases where the man I hook up with is genuinely surprised that I enjoy sex and looking at his body.  These same guys are also surprised that I don’t want to do sexual things that I don’t enjoy.  They are surprised that I would rather have sex than give oral sex, because that seems to them like I’m doing a bigger favor.  They just can’t understand that one of those things feels much better for me than the other, and that’s how I decide what I want to do.  These have been the minority of men in my experience, and I like to think I got through to some of them, but there are still far too many that think sex is just a favor from a woman to man.

Anyway, I vote that we give up completely on these silly romantic comedy movies and go back to musicals with catchy songs.

I can imagine an Alt-Austen who took the components of Pride and Prejudice and instead celebrated Lydia Bennet’s daring to run away with Wickham for nothing more than hot sex.  It wouldn’t be very much like the Austen we know and love, but it’s the kind of thing that the earliest women novelists liked to imagine.  There’s an old series by Pandora Press called “Mothers of the Novel,” done in the 1980s, which republished a lot of women novelists before Austen.  It’s not all wonderful stuff, but it’s really interesting to see how much there was and how little anyone remembers it.

Yes, Bingley.  Good one.  I lose track easily.

I still think it’s an entirely more sympathetic view than you will usually see in a movie of what motivates women to be “golddiggers”.

Really?  I kind of thought Rose’s mother was one of the major antagonists in that movie.  The whole frame of the story is “my mom wants me to marry this total d-bag just because he’s rich, but I really want to be modern and fall in love with a bohemian who travels steerage”. 

I suppose the period setting might have softened things up a little bit, but all in all she comes off like a gold-digging asshole.  Especially considering the fact that love marriages were pretty much a fact of life by 1913 or whatever - it’s not like the film takes place in medieval Europe or something.

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1) I liked SOMETHING NEW quite a bit. (I’ve met my share of African-American women who feel they have to be perfect—and am a recovering one myself.  smile) And 1938’s HOLIDAY (with Grant and Hepburn) is one of the best romantic comedies out there because the characters have a hella-lot more at stake than “Can bride fit into Vera Wang?” crap. If the leads don’t see that their freewheeling ways are right for each other, he risks getting buried alive in a horrible marriage; she will miss out on a happy life away from her ghastly-stiff family.

2) All the really pernicious rom-com crap we’re getting now is deitrius from the last of the Bush era. Hollywood probably won’t flush its pipes of this crap for another two years—we’ve still got those movies based on that “Marry Anyone or Die” Lori Gottlieb article and the one about the DABA women in the NYT around that time. raspberry

Okay, as for Love Actually, the most redeeming feature of the flick is that Emma Thompson’s character went through with the divorce from her selfish asshole of a husband.  I picture her having a lovely independent life in London whilst her ex-husband (Alan Rickman) has a miserable time.

Unfortunately, I’ve had plenty of cases where the man I hook up with is genuinely surprised that I enjoy sex and looking at his body.

A guy said something like this to me recently, and it kind of blew my mind.  Not so much that he was surprised that I enjoy sex, but he seemed honestly taken aback by the fact that I seemed to really find him physically sexy, and that I complimented him on his looks.  He said something like, “Straight girls* don’t tell me I’m beautiful.”  And I can definitely say that it’s not because he isn’t good looking - the upshot seemed to be that he simply wasn’t used to hearing a woman use words like “gorgeous”, “sexy”, etc to describe his body.

* I’m apparently the first openly bisexual woman he’s been with, and he’s been really into cataloging all the ways I’m different.  Which he seems to think are because I’m bi, which is a little weird, but whatever…

And here’s a (another?) vote for HIGH FIDELITY being an ace rom-com. If Hollywood had done this movie with a female lead, it would have wound up like that stupid THE EX-LIST TV show or something…

Oh, try Midnight, 1939, Claudette Colbert, John Barrymore, Don Ameche. Hilarious screwball comedy, just released to DVD a while back.

Really?  I kind of thought Rose’s mother was one of the major antagonists in that movie.  The whole frame of the story is “my mom wants me to marry this total d-bag just because he’s rich, but I really want to be modern and fall in love with a bohemian who travels steerage”.

If the mum were still wealthy I’d agree with you, but she wasn’t.  She was being rational, based upon the probable outcome of herself and her daughter if the advantageous match didn’t happen.  I expect even a woman of Rose’s age would understand the implications.

She was being rational

This is something that might sound better in 1913, but “ZOMG if you don’t marry a rich dude we might have to actually GET JOBS!  Ohnoes!” isn’t exactly what I’d call rational.  It’s what I’d call gold-diggy.  The mother is worried about them losing their class standing, not starving.

In eighteenth century Britain, there really was very little recourse for all but the poorest women outside of marriage.  By the twentieth, women could and did work outside the home.  Respectable ladies of a certain social standing did not work, but plenty of other women did.

I always wondered what Rose’s mother did once her daughter was “dead.” Probably she did wind up taking in sewing. Or meeting a fate like Lily Bart’s…:)

But it wasn’t “gold-diggy” in 1913, it was rational.  Frankly, it’s not that “gold-diggy” in 2009, considering that women still have fewer economic opportunities than men.

So are there any that don’t suck, in the collective wisdom of the Pandagonite XX crowd?

Benny and Joon?

The fact that women worked in the early 20th century does not mean that they were generally able to work themselves to affluence, or even a reasonable level of security.  Rose gives up a lot when she gives up her financial security.

Oh, deering, Holiday is GREAT. It’s worth mentioning that the Kathryn Hepburn character, tried her hand at various types of work, such as hospital staff, union organizer, etc, which her father always made her give up to protect the family image: message being that women need a sense of purpose, too.

The Grant/Hepburn Holiday is just about my favorite movie.  We watch it every New Year’s and, disturbingly, identify far more with the Edward Everett Horton character and his wife than with the protagonists.

ginmar, Samantha, Eileen—DESIGN FOR LIVING is a great olde-schoole rom-com, as well.  Why should a woman have to take whatever hat fits at the time, when a man can try on as many as he wants?

Intolerable Cruelty, with Clooney and Zeta-Jones.  It’s not very romantic, but it’s an excellent comedy about horrible people.

I love the scene in Four Weddings when McDowell tells Grant about her previous lovers in chronological order, and he’s taking it fine as she reels off half a dozen, then she says “oh, yes, and the next one was on my parents bed” “NO” “Yes, it was right after my fifteenth birthday party” and his eyebrows just go *boink*

I really love French Kiss. The scene where Ryan is mocking Klein with the spring-loaded, drooping Eiffel tower- classic.

Re: Something Different-  back when that movie came out, one of my co-workers was a well-educated, rigorous church attending, mid/late 20’s African American woman stuck in a lowpaying dead end secretarial job with no trace of a personal life.

She went out and saw Something Different, was talking with another coworker the next day about how it was a really good movie and “there will be more of that sort of thing in the future”, then she looks at me and says “No offense”.
///
Many of the romantic comedies getting lauded here (Gilbert Grape, Amelie) are kind of marginally romantic comedies at best. I mean, in Gilbert Grape, Gilbert and his love interest have, what, maybe three scenes together, two of which are spent bashfully staring at the ground?

And don’t forget the trap of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Jesus. You can’t win. And in Benny and Joon, Joon’s got Magical Movie Mental Illness, which adds a certain…squickiness to things. Unless Benny is supposed to be mentally ill as well. It’s been a while.

  I’m so sick of romcoms and their heroines. With the significant exception of My Big Fat Greek Wedding—-problems there, too, but what the hell———the heroines in these movies are no fun. They have no opinions, no inner lives, no wit, no humor, no imagination. I mean, Lucy in While You Were Sleeping has two dreams: meeting Mr. Eyebrows and going to Florence. So then what? And there were some class issues there, too. She works a tollbooth; he’s a banker or something. What would they talk about?  Let’s face it, Cinderella and Prince Charming—-the original romcom pairing—-probably had a lot of long, awkward silences. Let’s hope the sex was great.

There’s a whole spectrum of types of love and all we get are dramas or romcoms. And in damned few of them are women allowed a whole spectrum of happy. Do they have adventures, big ambitions, happiness, competence, or maturity? Like, you know, adults? It’s marriage or death.  I want to see women having adventures and fun and flings and all kinds of stuff. All we get at the box office are Renee Zellwegger or some other flavor of the month.  It’s either comedy that kind of makes fun of women—-Bride Wars or some drama.

Yes, I’m in a crappy mood. There’s an audience for romcoms, that’s great; but there’s women out there who love adventure and sci fi and don’t think their whole life sucks if there’s not some guy in it.  Also? Casting directors could do themselves a favor if they just cast actors who have actual chemistry. Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts? Obviously the drugs in Hollywood are really high quality.

Oh, yeah and: Rise of the Lycans. I’m telling you. Good kissing is a surprising deficit in a lot of these movies.

Highly recommended: the aforementioned Groundhog Day and Tootsie. Perfectly written comedies that happen to have a romantic “boy tries to win girl’s heart” theme. No sexist, stereotypical female characters in the pair.

Note that these both have male leads. Perhaps the problem with all the female-lead rom-coms is that the protagonist is usually a twit? If I see one more trailer where the lead (usually Drew Barrymore) does a pratfall, I will scream. Just because a woman is having man problems doesn’t mean she has to fall to the ground.

PiaToR:
This is going to sound stupid, and I know it’s probably not even a romantic comedy, but Bring It On is my favorite romantic comedy. 

The worst one I’ve ever watched: Women.
It’s got Meg Ryan, and the women from Will and Grace, and Jada Pinkett Smith, and Eva Mendes, and the mom from American Beauty, and there are no men shown, and it is advertised as “feminist”.  And it is such a load of crap.  How can they have a movie that shows no men, and still everything that happens is about getting and/or keeping a man? 
Also, somebody in that movie actually has the lines: “Nobody hates Saks Fifth Avenue”.

To a couple of the commenters who’ve said it, no, all rom coms are not shit and I always think it comes off as sexist to dismsiss an entire genre (which, surprise, is catered towards women).  Let’s not forget the wonderful genre of “action movies” which isn’t dismissed in the same way and yet which has provided actors like Jean Claude Van Damme with a long career (sorry, Jean Claude).

That isn’t sexist. That’s a statement of sexism in hollywood. “Movies for women” suck the same way “Christian Rock” sucks: The jackasses that produce it assume they have a captive audience, so they just don’t care. Women, they assume, will go and see the latest romcom because that’s what they do, so who gives a shit if the plot is good, the writing is snappy, or the characters are memorable?

Many of the romantic comedies getting lauded here (Gilbert Grape, Amelie) are kind of marginally romantic comedies at best. I mean, in Gilbert Grape, Gilbert and his love interest have, what, maybe three scenes together, two of which are spent bashfully staring at the ground?

Yep, that sounds familiar…

I have to question Groundhog Day as a romance. Isn’t Andie McDowell’s character pretty much a cipher?

I’m wondering if anyone has ever seen “Eagle vs Shark”?  Alas, when it came out, I really wasn’t in the mood for any romantic films, so I missed it.

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned these yet, but maybe it’s because they’re really not comedies: Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke and directed by Richard Linklater.  They’re both beautiful, romantic, intelligent films, and I love them.  But the laughs are few and far between.

My other favorite romance films are Wild at Heart and True Romance, both of which are barred from the “Comedy” designation by dint of having an extremely high body count.

Sniff. Some of us women like some violence with our romance.

“as with most films, but it’s reflected more obviously in the dreck they’re feeding women as their perceived least-valued customer base”

The thing is woman didn’t buy these films especially in the test audiences they wouldn’t exist as a theaterical run movie expierance. It would be straight to dvd.

Twilight is popular among women in their 20s and 30s. I was at a dinner with two of my female cousins and I could tell they were talking about Twilight by how they were gushing about this male talking this female on a romantic trip in this book series they were talking about.

The fact that women worked in the early 20th century does not mean that they were generally able to work themselves to affluence

This is what I mean when I say that she’s worried about losing her class status, not starving.  Elizabeth Bennet would probably have to either become a whore or starve, in Regency England.  Titanic‘s Rose has a world of perfectly acceptable career options.  None of them will enable you to be an idle jet-setter, but you’re not going to end up in a ditch.

The worst one I’ve ever watched: Women.

This movie is notorious for having been in development, like, FOREVER.  I think it was originally meant to cash in on the interest in all-female casts that arose out of Waiting To Exhale.  That’s how long it took to actually get made.  Which is usually a sign of an absolutely horrid movie.  In fact, I think a lot of the problem with the films we’re talking about is that they’re just really bad movies.  And as Hekie has been saying, there are bad movies full of stupid stereotypes in all genres.

his in spite of the fact that many of the films are objectively very good/excellent/entertaining and any that people don’t agree with can come down to taste or whatever.

Especially when you consider that it’s generally accepted among most sane feminists that you can still like the Rolling Stones, or Woody Allen, or De Kooning, or a great many other artists/kinds of art which are fundamentally sexist, just on the basis of their being good art.  Of course this doesn’t excuse films like The Women which are dreck.  But, while Amelie has its sexist tropes, it’s fundamentally a good film.

And don’t forget Ugetsu!

“Good romantic comedy? Jeffrey. “

OMG.  I love love love ‘Jeffrey’.  Patrick Stewart is freakin hilarious in that movie.  And Olympia Dukakis “It’s coming right off!”  Omg. I love that movie.

I loved ‘Chocolat’ - not really a rom-com, but better than nearly all the films that are called ‘rom-coms’.

Twilight is popular amongst women with some seriously fucked-up relationship issues. Boy watches girl as she sleeps, wants to suck her blood and thinks sex is dirty? Or something? Yeah, fucked up. And let’s not forget about teenage marriage, having no ambitions beyond boyfriends at all, and a really really scary view of pregnancy.

@Wareq. I mainly lurk at TVTropes, but I have occasionally put a few things in. Among other things, the Named Weapons page was lacking, of all things, Stormbringer, so I fixed it.* :D

Also, I make no apologies for loving my fluffy dippy <strike>girl</strike> woman love romantic comedy, any more than I do for loving most anything with Chow Yun Fat in it. I will defend my affection for it in the face of mild torture. More-than-mild torture, of course, is a different issue. What, precisely, would you like to hear?

* Of course I could just be old.

“And in Benny and Joon, Joon’s got Magical Movie Mental Illness, which adds a certain…squickiness to things. Unless Benny is supposed to be mentally ill as well.”

Been a while for me, too, but wasn’t Benny her brother, not Johnny Depp’s character?  Though if memory serves, yeah, Depp’s character was tap-dancing on the edge of movie-mental illness himself.

“They have no opinions, no inner lives, no wit, no humor, no imagination. I mean, Lucy in While You Were Sleeping has two dreams: meeting Mr. Eyebrows and going to Florence. So then what? And there were some class issues there, too. She works a tollbooth; he’s a banker or something. What would they talk about?”

Ehn.  It might be my soft spot for Sandra Bullock talking, but her character in While You Were Sleeping was quick enough to fill in the blanks for Mr. Hotshot Comapatient’s large, working-class family, runs circles around the actual romantic lead, traded her daydream about romance with him for a desire to be part of his family pretty early on, and then decided to go to Florence by herself.  It’s one of the lesser offenders in the genre.

Reading about Elizabeth Bennet’s friend in the actual novel is a bit upsetting for me. At least in Bride and Prejudice, Lalita’s friend, Chandra, ends up liking the man she marries, despite being his second choice after being outright rejected by Lalita.

I don’t really see much of the MPDG in Amelie... to me it was a movie about a young woman suddenly realizing she could do more for people than she was just doing, the catalyst being a young man she’s fallen for but is too scared to admit to her feelings. So she re-focuses her energy to helping others, before realizing that she has to help herself, too. I found it incredibly gratifying. Besides which, the execution of the movie was delightful.

And Stardust! Yeah, it’s more of an action fantasy than an actual rom-com But! It passed the Bechdel Test!!

Ugh, just saw this trailer for “Obsessed” in a theater yesterday and I wanted to throw something at the screen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdXQikBKWnM

Crazy working woman stalks innocent family man, only to be taken down by his angelic wife.  It’s even a step down from Fatal Attraction—at least Glenn Close had a successful career, in this movie the stalker is an assistant.

Even today, although gold-digging has declined, most people have at least one eye on economics when choosing a life partner. A lot of it is subsumed in class separations for dating, but it’s still there.

Antigone:

Sometimes it is, sometimes it ain’t. But you’re not going to find a lot of rich, well-educated people dating poor, uneducated ones in any serious fashion.

Sniff. Some of us women like some violence with our romance.

Please tell me you’re thinking more “Something Wild” or “A Life Less Ordinary” than “Natural Born Killers”...

Women don’t really like sex that much; they just tolerate it to lure unwilling men into pretending to care about us.

Interesting article in Sunday’s NYT magazine on nongay, professional women living in manfree households, raising their and their female housemates’ adopted daughters. Ex-husbands were referred to as “deadbeats,” although one woman was quick to say she did talk up some aspects of her marriage, so as not to prejudice her daughters.

I was starting to feel redundant, except possibly as a source of sperm.

Bride and Prejudice

What do people think of this? It’s updated, and there’s music and dancing.

And people who liked Without Reservations should watch the German original, Mostly Martha

Bride and Prejudice

What do people think of this? It’s updated, and there’s music and dancing.

Dreck.  Absolute dreck.

Though I do credit it for my epiphany in realizing that probably a large majority of Western marriages are “arranged”, we just don’t think of it that way.  I did like the fact that Chadha pulled no punches on the South Asian vs. Western cultural stuff.  But overall, as a film?  VOMIT.  Not even for feminism reasons, just because it’s a terrible, terrible movie.

No question, Four Weddings & A Funeral is my favorite in this genre.

It’s got relationships of all sorts. Straight, gay, badly chosen, wisely chosen, murky, stereotypical, non-stereotypical, plus Rowan Fucking Atkinson on the celibacy front.

The film’s only flaw is Andie McDowell. Next to so many good actors, she’s incredibly wooden, and honestly I fail to see what Hugh’s character sees in her beyond a good boinking. But then, I confess a crush on Kristin Scott Thomas.

It’s worth noting that the movie was by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, who are also responsible for the phenomenal Black Adder series. Good writing is good writing.

Isn’t Andie McDowell’s character pretty much a cipher?

True of every movie she appears in: The film’s only flaw is Andie McDowell…, she’s incredibly wooden,

She’s like an oracle: the observer invests her with meaning.

Does anyone remember the TV series Family? (It featured Kristy McNichol, I believe.) The mother’s face never changed expression, either. (Sada Thompson)

Um…A Life Less Ordinary. Oh, hey, the last movie I could stand Cameron what’s her face in.

  Hm…Maybe I’ll have to give While You Were Sleeping another shot. I do have a thing for Bill Pullman, and Sandra Bullock’s always been a fave of mine.

Now, if only there were werewolves….If you actually have an adventure wrapped around a romance, it gets the blood pumping, you’d think people would realize these two things go better together. Rules are broken. Taboos are….whatever you do to taboos. But that would mean girls would actually get to have some fun.

“Now, if only there were werewolves”

Too bad you’re anti-Twilight, Ginmar.

Sniff. Some of us women like some violence with our romance.

Yes we do! (Well, with our romantic movies, anyway.)

ginmar, have you heard about “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”?  (Available from Amazon).

True of every movie she appears in: The film’s only flaw is Andie McDowell…, she’s incredibly wooden,

“Michael”?

“How could anyone NOT be anti-Twillight?  The books and movie is absolute crap. “

I was just kidding.  Irrespective of quality, there are werewolves in them.

Bride and Prejudice

What do people think of this? It’s updated, and there’s music and dancing.

Dreck.  Absolute dreck.

Though I do credit it for my epiphany in realizing that probably a large majority of Western marriages are “arranged”, we just don’t think of it that way.  I did like the fact that Chadha pulled no punches on the South Asian vs. Western cultural stuff.  But overall, as a film?  VOMIT.  Not even for feminism reasons, just because it’s a terrible, terrible movie.

It’s worth watching though, because it is so bad. I mean—there is a freaking gospel choir! It’s classic.

“I’m confused. Shouldn’t the female outline’s heart be in, uh, her HEART as opposed to her brain? As in, relationships to women are about feeling more than thinking, while the male outline, why, of course men are about the lust.”

“I know, it’s a bad analogy, since it would seem to mean either women’s brains rule their hearts, which we all KNOW is untrue: women are irrational creatures ruled by emotion, or that men’s hearts rule their dicks, which we all KNOW is untrue: men are beasts who will fuck anyone, anytime, anywhere, given the slightest incentive.”

I think the short form of the message sent is meant to be:

1.  Women have hearts but no brains, but that’s okay, because

2.  Men have dicks but no hearts.

3.  Were these two made for each other or what?  Whoo-ee!!  Ain’t life grand?

JMI (Just My Interpretation…)

A really old romcom with good feminist credits is the 1940 classic, “His Girl Friday,” starring Rosalind Russell as a hotshot reporter, Cary Grant as another hotshot reporter she used to be married to, and Ralph Bellamy as the boring guy Russell is going to marry.  Except she keeps getting caught up in later and later deadlines, delaying her departure for their honeymoon, increasingly wondering what the fuck she’s going to do if she’s not chasing the next story.

It is based on a Broadway show with two male leads (no previous marriage of course) called “The Front Page,” and was remade with male leads again (Lemmon/Matthau) under that name.

So I guess, to have a good female role in a show, it helps to have the character to have been originally intended as a male role.

Oh, and the heart positioning?  Again, I still think it’s because putting the hearts together makes a blowjob. 

Think of it as lipstick.

Oh, and the heart positioning?  Again, I still think it’s because putting the hearts together makes a blowjob.

*sigh*

“Women’s emotions are centered in their heads [cue neurotic obsession as tiny little brain overheats]. Men’s emotions are centered in their dicks [cue sexual hijinks as mere male goes chasing pussy]”

PIATOR, I read “Women’s emotions are centered in their heads [cue neurotic obsession as tiny little brain overheats]. Men’s emotions are centered in their dicks [cue sexual hijinks as mere male goes chasing pussy]” already.

But I don’t think the message is ever “women’s emotions are centered in their heads.”  People constantly berate women for not using their heads as it is.  Women are stupid, right?  They don’t overuse their brains.  They underuse them, relying on their hearts instead.

What you quoted is close—putting the heart in the brain could signify “women’s brains are addled with emotion.”  But then you’d have to conclude that men’s dicks are addled with emotion.  And I really doubt that that’s the message.  It seems it is assumed to go the other way around, that men’s emotions are addled by their dicks.

Soo, if you wanted to show that, you could put a brain in the woman’s chest and the man’s crotch, to signify women think with their hearts, men with their penises.  But they didn’t do that.  And I don’t think it’s because that’s not their message.  I think it’s because brains don’t have the instant shape identification or pretty red color of the hearts.

I think it’s more likely that the people who made the poster aren’t so consistent with their iconography, but know a good catchy image, with a side of penis and lipstick joke, when they see it.

Personally, I liked Chocolat with Juliette Binoche and Alfred Molina. Not really a romantic comedy, although it had romance and comedy in it, but what I’d imagine a rom com with a soul and a brain to be.

I have to say, in terms of the visual symbolism of the poster, it’s wonderfully fun to misread if you know that what we know as the “heart” symbol is originally a vulvic/female sexual icon.  So what the illustration really seems to be saying is that some people have vulvas for genitals (the “male” figure), whereas other people have vulvas on their faces. 

If anything, an alien with only a cursory level of familiarity with Earth culture would interpret the poster as having something to do with Butch/Femme lesbianism - perhaps signifying who is the top and who is the bottom.

Okay, as for Love Actually, the most redeeming feature of the flick is that Emma Thompson’s character went through with the divorce from her selfish asshole of a husband.

I totally don’t remember that happening, although it’s been a while since I saw it. My favorite thread in the film was the Liam Neeson bonding with his stepson bit, which I guess tells you how I feel about romcoms.

Some other films that I liked but don’t know if they really count as romcoms: Moulin Rouge, Grosse Point Blank, Stranger than Fiction.

Worst romcom I’ve seen of late has to be Mamma Mia, the entire premise of which being that none of the cast had heard about paternity tests. And I even LIKE ABBA.

I have nothing to add to this thread other than to note with satisfaction that TV Tropes Wiki is spreading throughout the population like the highly invasive, incurable mimetic virus it really is.

Raising Arizona has the ending of a good rom-com

Next Stop Wonderland  My fave
Singles  A Fave
Working Girl  Another fave
Pretty in Pink
Chasing Amy
Green Card - I liked Andie MacDowell in this
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
I’ll say it:  Pretty Woman
Shakespeare in Love
Better Off Dead
Sixteen Candles
Amelie
But I’m a Cheerleader
Moonstruck
When Harry Met Sally
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Kissing Jessica Stein

I don’t know if this counts as a romantic comedy, but I loved Pane e Tulipani (Bread & Tulips).  And Hors de Prix with Audrey Tautou was clever.

Everyone’s taste is different, but I think there’s a wealth of entertaining and sometimes thoughtful romantic comedies.

Love, Actually is a romantic comedy for evolutionary psychologists - all the men have their dreams come true - no matter how outlandish, while all women over 30 get shit on - Emma Thompson’s character is humiliated when her husband ditches her for a younger woman and Laura Linney’s character can’t get together with a hot guy because she is on call 24/7 for her violently insane brother.

The NYTimes review nailed it:

It is disturbing to see Ms. 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

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9804E3D7153BF934A35752C1A9659C8B63

I knew nothing about this movie when I started watching it, and with some great actors in it, I was disposed to like it, but its incredible misogyny and contrivances had me feeling completely ripped-off at the end.