3 Reasons Why Romantic Comedies Suck
If there is one genre that personifies the lack of creativity and risk-taking by Hollywood studios, it must be romantic comedies. I’m not one to hate on romantic movies but is there anything more predictable, craptacular and generic these days? For some reasons, Hollywood executives are mistakenly under the impression that audiences crave for idiotic and lazy rom-coms that pander to the audience. Where is the intelligent humor and heart that every movie-goer craves for? With Friday’s release of Edward Zwick’s Love and Other Drugs, which is getting surprisingly mediocre reviews so far despite some festival buzz, I thought it would be a good time to highlight what Hollywood filmmakers are doing wrong.
1. It’s Not About The Romance
Most romantic comedies focus so hard on the romance that the love story completely consumes the entire movie. Most of the best romantic movies allow external forces to impact the lives of our lovebirds. May it be the Nazi threat in Casablanca, or a career in Broadcast News, life doesn’t stop simply because the characters are smitten in love. Unfortunately, nearly all of the conflicts happening in today’s rom-coms are completely related to the characters’ drive to be happily in love. If she finds the man of her dream, all her issues will suddenly be fixed: she will not be an uptight bitch anymore, her clumsiness will be fixed, her self-esteem problems will be a thing of the past etc…
2. Hapless and Weak-Willed Female Character
The big problem with rom-coms as of late is that most people don’t realize how rampantly sexist and degrading most have become. They ridicule both men and women into this collection of stereotypical or even plain stupid impulses instead of portraying them as whole thoughtful persons with their own unique motives and lives. Must women be “saved” by men to be fully functional, have high self-esteem and be happy? Sadly, Hollywood filmmakers seem to think so. Only in the movies will you see clumsy, neurotic and uptight women find love so easily. Note to Hollywood: Strong, brainy, independent and capable women are sexy.
3. Neither Romantic or Funny
When was the last time you saw two people truly falling in love in a movie? It just doesn’t happen anymore. These days, a lazy meet-cute at first sight is all it takes and there is nothing romantic about that. Not only that but it creates a false sense of what love is. When it comes to the comedic parts, it almost universally degrades into idiotic pratfalls and vulgar sex jokes. It might be amusing at times but there is nothing truly funny about those. Have writers become so lazy that they give no effort whatsoever in crafting witty dialogue? Sadly, until filmmakers stop pandering to the lowest common denominator, the fate of the romantic comedy remains hopeless.
How did romantic comedies go so far downhill in recent years? Is the genre doomed to mediocrity for eternity? Let us know in the comments!
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63 Comments
Oh, really? Is it that bad? I read that Anne and Jakey G have sizzling on-screen chemistry.
It’s hovering in the 30′s on Rotten Tomatoes with 40 reviews in, which is pretty conclusive at this point. I would think +-40% is where it will settle if it’s lucky. I’m very surprised that so many critics didn’t like it after the somewhat positive buzz at TIFF. The box office is going to be limited by the R-rating and the mediocre reviews so this is likely to be a mild flop.
I think it might have to do more with the genre than anything else. We, people who write about films, tend to not be very favorable towards certain genres.
I might be inclined to say that rom-coms are having their “horror films are tacky” season. xD
I doubt it. I’m objective with all genre
and I expect most critics on RT, at least, pretend to be. Plus, this is a movie that was supposed to be in contention for some awards. Guess this isn’t happening anymore lol
Just saw some of the reviews on RT… One reviewer said: “There’s no drug strong enough to get me through another movie like Love and Other Drugs.” That about sums it up. I couldn’t even go through the entire TRAILER, let alone the movie.
Yea, the trailer is pretty terrible.
Oh, and having said that above-
I have been battling it for Rom-coms, I really think a romantic comedy or a chick flick shouldn’t be considered negative. We could say the same for action films, you know.
In my Chick Flicks post, I mentioned that a lot of American chick flicks tend to focus all their attention on the couple getting together. We agree on that, but it’s not really the ‘genre’!
I guess we could say My Sassy Girl (not the American remake) was a romantic drama… with splashed of comedy. The main idea is that, yes – it’s about a guy and a girl who meet. They’re going through issues, and they solve those issues… it actually works really well.
Rom-coms in general have to do with charm, I think. Love Actually is total romantic sap, but one can’t actually not like Colin Firth learning Portuguese to conquer Aurelia. So our problem is… there isn’t really a charismatic romantic comedy girl that works with a charismatic rom-com leading man.
I’m not saying that rom-coms are a terrible genre, I’m optimistic that with great writing and audiences demanding higher quality films, the romantic comedy can be revived to its glory days. People are actually voting with their wallet and if they continue to flock to crap like The Ugly Truth or The Bounty Hunter, studios will keep pumping those.
I agree Castor, a lot of the best love stories out there happen in the unlikeliest circumstances. But you know what else is bad about today’s rom-com? NO romance! It’s all about getting physical. It’s as if feelings has become a nuisance and y’know, a thing of the past. I kind of touched upon that subject in my Blade Runner posts… it’s ironic that sci-fi movies or thrillers can be far more romantic than rom-coms!
Thats actually true! A problem is that a lot of romcoms try to be family friendly and therefore the love or sex parts don’t tend to be as passionate as scenes from the genres you bring up.
Most romantic comedies summed up in five easy steps:
1. Girl meets man
2. Man and Girl don’t get along.
3. Man does something quasi-nice (tutors, coaches baseball, dances – it’s usually something pretty minuscule)
4. Woman realizes she does love the man
5. The man makes an over the top romantic gesture, two begin relationship.
The fifth one is usually the film’s honest attempt at hiding the last two hours of the girl chasing the guy (while simultaneously resenting him). Some morphed perception that the girl must be sought after, she can’t be the one seeking (if it’s to be ‘true love’).
You’re completely right about the romance though. There is almost no romance in these films. It’s a bit like saying the Earth and the Moon are in love just because one orbits the other. There needs to be honest interaction between the two for anything of rel substance to develop. The writers who know this and really work towards never write generic rom-coms and therefore their films are shuffled into indie land 90% of the time (500 Days of Summer = perfect example).
You forgot a few adjectives:
- Man = jerk and asshole
- woman = uptight bitch
I figured those were pre-defined variables.
Rightly Said
can we think of romantic comedies – without including 500 Days of Summer, which is fairly recent. Ahhh, time for IMDb Adv. search~
Results:
Amelie – a romantic comedy with other quirky qualities that gets shuffled into the “foreign” section.
My Sassy Girl -hmm, like I said this was more of a romantic drama with funny moments. I think they bought the rights for the US, but they decided on the remake, instead. It didn’t translate well.
Hmmm… Garden State? Which is also labeled as an indie dramedy?
Love Actually
Sideways
High Fidelity – haven’t watched in a while, but isn’t Cusak kind of a jerk and his gfs kind of uptight? I really must refresh this.
Love Me If You Dare – kind of dark but whimsical, non?
I didn’t know there were so many (over 1000 results), but most of the ones I thought were kinda good are independent and/or labeled indie or hipster films. Nothing commercial… I mean, in terms of Hollywood productions. Something’s wrong with Hollywood.
I hated Love Actually, so syrupy I wanted to poke myself in the eye with a harpoon
One wonders why you have tha machoistic urge to see every new RomCom? You gotta be a big fan of the genre to start with. Feels like your sweeping the market for the next “When Harry met Sally”. Very entertaining rants though!
Out of this year’s crop, I have seen only one true rom-com: When In Rome (on Netflix). I’m pretty sure there was a lot more I didn’t see Joel
Edit: Oh and Leap Year
haha you must be a lot noisier when seeing a romcom then!
This is my second rant in about a year, I can be a lot noisier
Wait, don’t get it.
Leap Year was good?
No it sucked. Don’t believe what Joel is going to tell you
Actually I found Leap Year a little entertaining.
http://www.joelburman.com/2010/05/leap-year-varfor-sa-daliga-recensioner/
LOL – Yes, I know Joel is a little bit biased. xD
When it comes to Amy Adams I do tend to be forgiving on her even when doing cash in roles (Leap Year) or trashy films (Cruel Intensions 2).
I had to jump in here. Leap Year sucked! It was one of the most ridiculous movies I have ever seen. I can’t believe Amy Adams was even in such a stupid movie.
Awww, are you kidding?
Love Actually is the perfect syrup for the holidays! Or maybe it was the time when I saw it, but I was a really frequent visitor of airports when Love Actually opened.
I am with Castor I don’t like Love Actually but its mostly because it felt really fragmented (to many characters).
If this is going to turn into a Love Actually bashing post I’m going to whip out my big guns and hold down the fort. It may be cheesy as hell but I can’t help but smile when watching Love Actually.
Right, Univarn? I’ll hold down the port with ya. It’s a holiday movie! It comes with the cheese.
Excuse me, but let’s not call Garden State anything because FUCK GARDEN STATE!
You are right most of the rom-coms I like most are Indie movies. They usually try to match up 2 beautiful people to fall in love. They never step outside of that safe formula.
One of my favorite rom-coms is Something New, about an interracial romance.
I actually like Hitch as a decent rom-com. It followed two couples and their efforts at love while not realizing they were falling in love. That’s how it ends up being rather real. All of Hollywood feel the need to dramatize romance, but Hitch still did a great job in my opinion. Most rom-coms disappoint. I did not enjoy 500 days of summer at all, but I think I disliked it mainly because it’s high level of realism lent itself to depression more so than it did to comedy.
True, that a similar line of thought may be made for action films. But Castor’s notes are overly present in rom-coms of this day and age.
Nice post!
I liked Hitch, definitely one of the best rom-coms of the last decade.
I too hate Romantic Comedies. I don’t know the reason. But I might be hate this Combination.
I had a big thing for romantic comedies for a long time, and have watched too many (my manhood weeps). Not only are the movies bad in terms of entertainment, its lack of realism negatively affects real-life relationships. People watch so many that if their real relationship isn’t just like what we’ve grown up watching, we panic and we think there’s something wrong. People fight, things get ugly, and the movie continues far after you kiss the girl at the airport. Chuck Klosterman’s opening chapter in “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” explains it far more perfectly than I can.
I still love a good chase scene though and even though rom-coms are not my cup of tea like they once were, I’m a sucker for when the guy or girl realize they want the other and go on a montage-heavy chase to find them and tell them how they feel. It’s my weakness; well that and crack cocaine.
Ah! I have watched my fair share of romantic movies over the years and as I stated above, I don’t have any problem with the genre per se. When someone goes and write a rant like the one above, people immediately assume that you must hate the genre as a whole but I don’t (just to make that clear after Amy and Joel got in my face lol). You are totally right that these movies provide the wrong expectations in terms of love but at the same time, people want to watch a fantasy and be swept off their feet for 90 or 100 minutes.
I hear ya Castor! I took your rant to me that you want them to be good and they should be good. Because people keep buying tickets to the crapfest, they keep churning these out. I can tell from the trailers what is not even worth my time. Then you sludge through the rest and hope to find a gem like 500 Days of Summer or Going the Distance. Sex and Other Drugs did get a good review in my local paper today and I do want to see it. I’m also waiting for How Will You Know. Granted, As Good As It Gets was not nearly as good as people made it out to be, James L. Brooks usually delivers a decent rom-com.
(500) Days of Summer, I thought, was a one viewing kind of situation. I tried to see it a second time, but it did not hold up and now I won’t go anywhere near it.
Not for me. I actually saw it again in the theater, which is rare, and a couple of times on DVD. It’s in my short stack of all time best rom-coms.
I think a lot of Hollywood films (not just rom-coms) are getting just plain lazy and they’re going with the ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ theory. If a boring and repetitive rom-com like The Proposal or The Ugly Truth makes a few million, the head honchos think if they keep making more films like that the cinemagoers will keep flocking back. I think this is true of other genres, like the action films (The Expendables, The A Team, Red) and we could do with some more original ideas.
If anyone would care to debate rom-coms in a guest post for my new series Battle of the Sexes, get in touch via the blog Final Cut. More info can be found here (http://screenspeak.blogspot.com/2010/11/new-feature-battle-of-sexes.html) and the first post (http://screenspeak.blogspot.com/2010/11/battle-of-sexes-expendables.html) went up today.
I think you are totally on the point here. As long as they get decent numbers at the boxoffice (a semi strong opening week) and they recoup at the DVD release they will continue to them this way.
The difference in development stage between a great film and one of the current hit and run status is to big compared to the revenues. The great ones seldom get exeptional numbers at the box office therefore its a lot easier to cash in with these easy hits.
Great point Joel. More often than not, a higher quality movie doesn’t translate into significantly better revenue at the box office. There is basically no financial incentive to making superior movies these days.
I think it’s a problem with backing a project up. Let’s be honest – most people aren’t on the hunt of the next best thing. They just watch what they know it’s available. If we’re bombarded with billboards of Jennifer Aniston and Heigl, or Adam Sandler’s latest crappy comedy – why would we even consider watching 500 Days of Summer, if it’s got a poster at the back back BACK of the last room of the theater.
This is why I think awards are important. To us, the Oscars have been awarding the same old people. However, if you talk to regular people on the street, not even at the cinema – they will tell you the Academy only awards the little movie that no one hears about.
For instance down here, we get most little films only after they get nominated for the Oscar and/or win… in the case of winning, they even push for release much faster. No way La Vie en Rose would have made it in March, if Marion hadn’t won that Oscar.
And… of course they make money! They open in over 4k theaters across the country, plus so many more screens worldwide. We should really make a ranking of Top-earners by screen average, not total.
I am sure that there are “smaller” films that manage to have great numbers if you count by screen average. But I still don’t think its really comparable to the blockbusters due to their enormous publicity money.
What should change is that the smaller movies need to get more space in the first place and not being pushed out there just for the sake of it (because the distributor got it in a package deal when purchasing a blockbuster).
Oh I’m all over a battle of the sexes! I’ll check you out tonight when I have more time.
I just got out of a screening of Love and Other Drugs. I’ll tell ya, I don’t think that it really qualifies as a rom-com. More of a romantic-drama than anything else.
Basically they’re neither funny nor romantic.
A new genre should be invented to call these rom-com wannabes we get nowadays!
cheese flicks =D
not to undermine chick flicks.
This is an interesting post for a person who writes about chick flicks. Mainly because I have been saying the same thing. I watch a lot of romantic comedies and half the time I don’t write about them on my blog, because I don’t want to be so negative.
Hollywood needs to wake up and realize that women want romance, but we are not love starved, pathetic man chasers like most of Katherine Heigl’s movies and (ugh) Leap Year.
Good Romantic Comedies
1. When Harry Met Sally
2. The Princess Bride
3. 500 Days of Summer
4. Just Wright
I’d add Return to Me… two unlikely leads + funny & touching script = winning formula!
Romantic comedies can be saccharine, sticky, kitsch, and banal – and make me want to puke. This is a genre that filled with repetitive muck.
#3 is the biggest tragedy of them all!
Great commentary, Castor! I often get ribbed for my dislike of the genre by my wife and other female relatives based on the presumption that I’m just being a bit too chauvinistic, for lack of a better term, to enjoy a movie geared at women.
But I have often pointed out exactly what you’ve described here. It’s not the romantic, lovey dovey aspect, it’s the sheer banality and predictability associated with the genre nowadays
I actually love it when a romcom shows some effort like some of the exceptions mentioned above.
But everyone has their guilty pleasures, I guess, and that’s theirs. Still, Hollywood, if you’re going to spend $20 mil making something, maybe you should spend an extra week or two on the script?
And that’s not just $20 million! Most of Hollywood’s rom-coms cost $40 million with a good $20 million to boot for Print & Advertising.
Totally agree with section 1 of this post! I hate that in the movie world people have so much time on their hands to think about how much they need a man… Don’t these people have jobs?? Also, as a struggling journalist trying to find a job, I seriously think #4 should be the relative ease and whimsy that comes with getting a swift promotion to some swanky magazine job. To quote Cher Horowitz, as if!
YES! Add to that an addendum about realistic living conditions and you’re onto something!
“Hi, I’m a cub reporter/self-employed baker/flora design student so all I can afford is this spacious 3-BR apartment with floor to ceiling windows and a designer kitchen…in Manhattan. Oh, and I can still afford to eat out at swanky restaurants, bars and coffee shops for every meal.”
The romantic comedy formula sells, and as long as it sells people will flock to creations based on that formula and “filmmakers” will continue to employ it. Sometimes, though, a movie changes the formula ever so slightly and the result is something much, much more satisfying and potent, and damn do I ever wish more movies like The Devil Wears Prada, and apparently Morning Glory, got made. These are movies that don’t insult the intelligence of their audiences with saccharine fantastical wish-fulfillment or degrade their characters by forcing them to behave like hysterical female cinematic stereotypes– they feel a lot more “real”, even if they neither go for nor achieve the effect of realism.
The problem is that there isn’t, apparently, much demand for romantic comedies that demand more of themselves and of their audiences, and as long as there’s little demand for rom-coms that are a cut above the rest then the same repetitious dreck will be pushed into theaters.
You nail it on the head that there really isn’t much demand for rom-coms that push beyond the craptacular concepts that we have been getting lately. I think both studios and audiences are getting so used to these formulaic concepts that they have no idea what to do with movies that don’t neatly fit into the category.
The most recent case being a movie you mention, Morning Glory. The studio had no idea what to do with it, a romantic comedy that isn’t really a romantic comedy (90% com/10% rom) but is marketed as one. One of the main reason it failed to attract more audiences despite being one of the higher quality film of the genre in years.
We can probably chalk it up to lazy writing and poor character development. I am generally a fan of the genre so I get a little saddened when I see drivel passing itself off as “romantic comedy.”
Incidentally saw Love and Other Drugs this weekend – pretty awful in my opinion. Found myself shifting a lot in my seat. Usually not a good sign. Cannot begin to list the problems I have with it.
Well the trailer was terrible so I can’t say I’m surprised the movie isn’t very good.
Castor – I had no real expectations either, but even with some of the rom-com turkeys out there, one can be mildly amused. As I sat through this I could care less about what I was watching.
In the end if not for the bad ones out there, we would not be able to appreciate the gems. Guess that is why we go to the movies!
Oh and I should further state a major problem with this film was that it did not know what it wanted to be.
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