Living the Romantic Comedy

Comfort Food

What I want to see when I see a movie is people that I could be, doing unthinkable things.   -- Peter Hedges

Let us now praise Steve Carell.

Fast becoming one of our best, most dependable comic icons, Carrell wins empathy via tiny, expertly timed nuances of expression.  Conflicted emotions appear to leak, unbidden, from the corners of his eyes and mouth.  What one sees in the face of Steve is the portrait of an endearing modern masculine fear: Am I giving myself away?  Are my vulnerabilities showing?  Do I look like I'm still okay, in control, on top of this mess I'm making of my life?

Carrell also possesses that necessary equipment vital to great comedic acting: a body that expresses the essence of our mind-body problem.  His gestures betray him, consistently demonstrating that he does not, in fact, know what to do with his physical self in any given situation; he inhabits his body yet it seems not to belong to him.

Brooding and dark in Little Miss Sunshine, exuberantly reprehensible in TV's The Office, Carrell has already created one classic-for-the-ages character as the sweet, gentle uber-nerdly 40 Year-Old Virgin (a role that reveals more genius with every viewing).  With Dan in Real Life, he achieves something perhaps even more difficult: portraying an almost regular guy.  He does indeed keep it real, and he renders Dan fascinating.

Juliet Binoche requires no praise, as her radiance is already long remarked-upon.

Peter Hedges, on the other hand, deserves special consideration.  He's already landmarked himself in my personal screenwriting pantheon for writing the wonderful What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (based on his own novel, no less).  But after a somewhat awkward directorial debut with Pieces of April, he's clearly come into his own with Dan. 

The movie, nicely shot, knowingly observed, feels lived-in, inherently credible even at its most contrived moments.  The casting is as good as it gets, with old pros Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney as the folks you'd like to have, and the almost painfully... steaming Emily Blunt as the one girl who can make Juliet Binoche jealous; even Dane Cook -- up till now thoroughly underwhelming in his non-stand-up career -- does a good turn, and the child actors are great without being cloying.

The absence of cloy, actually, is what makes Dan in Real Life a solid piece of work on the part of Hedges (pictured with his leads, above).  Sentimentality threatens it at every turn, but the movie never capitulates.  Given its Lifetime channel-like premise (the widower newspaper columnist with three cute daughters and the woman he meets who finally shakes him out of his shell), one might run for the hills.  And one, despite the film's many pleasures, may still run: Dan is a room-splitter, as my girlfriend Tater put it.  I can easily understand people loathing this movie, and they're entitled.  I see it as comfort food.

Maybe you always want haute cuisine; maybe only the latest and hippest eaterie will satisfy your rarified tastes.  Me, I still like my occasional peanut butter and jelly (chunky, strawberry, whole wheat and toasted, thanks) and love my meatloaf and mashed.  This is by way of saying that there is absolutely nothing cool about Dan in Real Life.  It is the opposite of cutting edge.

And is that so bad?  Dan is a triumph of the normal -- or rather, the triumph of how far normalcy can be stretched before it pops right into the realm of the absurd.  As Hedges points out in this illuminating interview, he and screenwriting collaborator Pierce Gardner wanted to show how ordinary people react to near-impossible situations.  And the film is at its finest when it gets the small stuff right: a seemingly offhand line of dialogue (listen for Binoche's muttered "oink") or a wryly articulated image (I'm still chuckling over the way Carrell, in a moment of great frustration, doesn't quite skip a too-large stone in the water, and how the three boys watching him do a perfect double-take with their backs to the camera).  And sorry to keep harping on Carrell's great instrument, but man, is he a fantastically awful dancer.

It's the small stuff here that lets us buy into the biggest contrivances.  Lord knows we've all seen that bit where a guy hiding in a shower has to endure the shower being turned on him, fully clothed.  But what Carrell and Binoche manage to do with such a hoary routine is a joy to behold; Hedges has written it well and directed it better, helped by the kind of crackerjack acting that renders the unbelievable totally true.  And there are a few great riffs here -- like one visual running gag about young love that's the best kind of poignant-funny -- that haven't really been done quite this way before.

No need to make too much of it.  Dan in Real Life is no reinvention of any wheel and not liable to please any audient who likes his or her cinema au currant.  Yes, it's predictable, and dangerously warm-and-fuzzy; in this Year of Apatow and the reign of raunchy boy-man rom-coms, the movie looks positively retro.  But if you're a romantic comedy fan in the mood for something that goes down easy and really hits the spot, I'd say Dan's your man.

The Joke

Sometimes the job of studio story analyst makes you feel like you’re facing Masonic mysteries, their inner logic known only to a secretly initiated few.

For example, a colleague of mine recently did exhaustive notes on three successive drafts of a studio project (i.e. a script that’s already been bought and is in development). The project’s writer routinely ignored each set of notes, and the draft got progressively worse. Only when the script went into turnaround (i.e. got dumped), did the reader realize that the studio had never had any intention of making this movie. They’d only bought the thing – written by the best friend of a successful director currently shooting a prestige project for them – to make their more valuable talent happy.

There’s nothing profoundly unusual about this (gambling – in Casablanca?!), but what irked us both was the practice, a tacit, often unconscious gambit by studio powers-that-be, of keeping the reader in the dark. If my colleague had understood from the get that this project was simply a go-through-the-motions task, he’d have been spared a lot of time, energy and frustration. As this reader put it, "Our job would be a lot easier if they’d just let us in on the joke."

He was using the term joke with implicit irony (this is a joke that leaves nobody laughing). The usage got my antennae up because I’ve lately been mulling over this concept of "the joke" with special attention. I’m teaching a seminar entitled Writing Funny Love: Comedy Craft For the Contemporary Romantic Comedy at next weekend’s Screenwriting Expo (see sidebar), and in our post-post-modern age of After Irony, the very idea of what constitutes a joke may be undergoing a shift. Joke, these days, may not necessarily mean funny.

The jokes that have always made us laugh seem to have two basic requirements: 1) they have to tell a story with an ending that surprises us, and 2) that surprise has to reveal a truth – expose something true about being human.

Reams have been written about the finer points of humor, and what’s generally observed is a certain necessary level of cruelty. The more brutal the reversal, the bigger the laugh: a clown slipping on a banana peel may be chuckle-worthy, but a powerful, uptight, self-important executive slipping on a banana peel – there’s your belly laugh. What’s the truth exposed? That pride goeth before the pratfall -- that even the mighty can be easily taken down by something small. Through a neat psychological trick, we both empathize with the butt of such a joke and don’t; we’ve all been both the peel and the pompous one, from time to time.

What’s more recent in the world of humor is strain of cynicism that subverts our basic expectations of what’s supposed to be humorous. I’ve been haunted by a joke told to me a few months ago by a young woman who looked to be still in her teens. I overheard her referring to a favorite joke that cracked her up every time, so I asked her to share it. The woman faced me, deadpan. "A man walks into a bar," she said. "And he’s an alcoholic and he’s destroying himself and his family."

I waited for the punch-line until I realized I’d already heard it, and could only manage a nod. Got me. Brilliantly, though, because it encapsulates a certain dark-edged sensibility that’s reflective of our present moment. It’s a joke about telling jokes, and the truth it speaks to is downright uncomfortable. I suppose its equivalent in the banana peel field would be: uptight pompous exec slips on banana peel and breaks his back, but because he’s got such good health insurance, he’s good as new and on the job again in no time -- unlike say, the millions of Americans who don’t have health insurance, who could easily end up unemployed and homeless after such a catastrophic accident.

Anybody laughing?

There’s a deeply cynical (and/or wounded, profoundly disappointed) subtext in that "man walks into a bar" joke, but its humor, such as it is, comes from deconstruction. The very premise of such jokes is being challenged, i.e. You think it’s funny, a man walking into a bar? Well, not so much in real life, right? This kind of truthful humor could easily leave a person feeling depressed, but there is a somewhat lighter level in play. A different sort of humor arises from the re-appropriation of language: we give you that same-old "man walks into a bar" phrase, and… oh, surprise: we know it’s an outmoded cliché.

So what does my studio colleague mean, when he describes his real-life situation as "not being in on the joke?"  He means that a truth is being withheld.  Well, it occurs to me that there is one way to have a last laugh, given the increasingly dire state of our society, our countries, the world at large – and the seeming inability of our representatives and leaders to identify the truth and to do anything pragmatic about it. We, too, need to re-appropriate our language.

Because by now, we’re in on some of the old jokes out there – the jokes that are only funny in that their trickery is so transparent. We know that the "Clear Skies Initiative" isn’t really about cleaning up the air, just as I know by now that the phrase "the studio’s bought a screenplay" isn’t necessarily about making a movie. So maybe we can begin to actively challenge the jokesters by re-framing the dialogue we’re having, and beat them at their own game.

There was a wonderful instance of turning "the joke" around on Bill Maher’s HBO show this past Friday night (a great piece of live entertainment, by the way, in that a trio of vocal protestors stopped the broadcast in its tracks and had to be bodily evicted). For a long time now, any questioning of our administration’s foreign policy has been countered by the accusation that such dissidence means one isn’t "supporting our troops."  On Maher's show, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, addressed this rhetorical gag of "the soldiers" being used as a political deflector.

"Every time the president talks about threatening those of us who want the troops to come home, they say, you’re cutting and running. Well, I’ve got something for him," she said. "I want to call [Iraq] a military success. I want to thank the soldiers for the job they’ve done. They’ve completed their mission, and I want them to come home with ribbons, and banners, and celebration… We’re not cutting and running, we’re acknowledging that the soldiers did their job… they went into Iraq and they got rid of Saddam Hussein… and now the political folks have got to find a resolution."

After audience applause, Lee added, "It’s a way of looking at it." Nicely done: take the very approach used by the powers-that-be (i.e. using volatile buzzwords to deflect complex issues) and turn it right back at them. Can’t deal with failure? Then let’s call it a success.

All the talking points, the phrases each side uses to bat the other side down – it really is a war of words. The most effective weapon may be a shift in perception that’s neatly articulated. Let’s take a lesson from our current comedians – choose our words just as cannily, and surprise the audience by exposing some truths. Maybe we can be in on the joke, and start turning the joke around.

Decency

People go to the movies to see something they can't get otherwise.

-- Ben Affleck in a recent interview.

Don't you just hate it when it seems like any blog you go to is somebody bitching and moaning about something that's wrong?  Isn't it tiring to find, in post after post, so many island dictatorships of the blogosphere sounding so unhappy?  Sometimes the web looks to me like a gnarly tangle of rants and ravings from the universe of the dissatisfied.

Not wanting to contribute to this constant nabobbing of negativity, I like to think of myself as a glass half-full, pony-person kind of guy, which is why I was brought up short when I glanced at one of my sidebars and noted the tenor of my last few blog posts: This Cliche Must Die, When Sex Isn't Sexy, The Movie That Isn't There...  It's like an invasion of the upbeat-snatchers; evidently even I've gone all Andy Rooney lately, dissing and diatribing just like all the other gloomy guses.

Well, enough of that.  As an antidote to the anti- in the atmosphere, let me now unreservedly praise something: I've just seen The Best Movie of the Year So Far That's Not a Romantic Comedy.  And weird to say, given as it's such a dark story in all its fundamentals, but Michael Clayton is ultimately an upper.  We go to the movies largely as a means to having our feelings, and in the end, despite the harrowing journey it takes to get there, this picture is about as feel-good as you'll find in the multiplexes these days.  It's a movie that's very much grounded in reality, and yet it offers hope.  You remember hope.

Hope -- and goodness and heroism and all that high road stuff -- seems to mostly be the provence of the supernatural this season.  As Alessandra Stanley noted in today's NY Times, half of what's presently on TV features the cavalry coming to the rescue from heavenly or sci-fi realms: magically empowered people bringing the dead back to life, returning errant lost souls to Hell, using their super-skills to save the cheerleader and the world.  Sad but true -- given the grim and daily more dire real world situation our powers-that-be have put us in, apparently the only way we'll buy a story with an epic happy ending is when there's higher powers on tap, to set everything right.

Maybe that's why, in the midst of all these heroic vampires, avenging angels and timely time-surfers, the presence of a bracingly human human being as hero feels so refreshing.  Though his is actually an old-fashioned story, Michael Clayton, as played by George Clooney doing the best work in his career thus far, is a contemporary prototype: he starts out a credibly, painfully flawed and morally compromised company guy.  That he goes up against "the way things are" in time-honored David v. Goliath tradition has a peculiarly inspiring resonance just now.  At a cultural moment when corporate deceit and indecency seems to rule the day, there's a welcome, near-forgotten thrill in seeing -- in the very back room belly of the corporation beast -- human decency triumph.

Wouldn't work if it weren't so deftly done.  Writer-director Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton is born of a celebrated writing dynasty, and it wasn't merely my being a fan of the Bourne franchise that got my antennae up when this pic came to town; when I note Sydney Pollack, Steven Soderbergh and Anthony Minghella joining forces to get a project produced, I figure the script can't be all that shabby.  And you writers out there -- be you into the legal thriller genre and George's good looks or not -- would be well-advised to give this one some study.

I'll be going back for a second look, ASAP, to check out the wiring and insulation on what seems like an improbably jerry-rigged rocket of a screenplay.  It's got a first act that felt at moments so confusing I didn't understand what the hell was going on -- but I didn't care, since what I wasn't comprehending was so damned entertaining.  You trust Gilroy implicitly (he's a natural director, with an unerring instinct for where to put you in a scene) even if you're lost. 

As Gilroy admits in this illuminating interview, a lot of what makes Clayton work is exactly what might ordinarily get "fixed" in development:

Q: Was it a trick to get the ambiguous stuff into this movie?
A: That's an interesting question. You wanna know the trick? The trick was to hang tough with it and not bring to bear all the things that you're trained to do in [regular studio rewrite/script work]. I'm trained to button scenes and round things off, and I get rewarded for doing that. And [in Michael Clayton] you have to keep navigating and be brave.

What he said.  It is a brave script in the chances it takes, and even in its deliverance of such a bold, immensely satisfying climax.  I can't remember the last movie I saw that's had me replaying its ending so many times in my head, savoring each detail.  So I especially look forward to seeing anew how it all got setup from the top.

The performances -- more examples of going against the grain, in that the emotionality of the piece is wonderfully modulated to avoid melodrama and pyrotechnics, banking on the audience's intelligence for a change -- are uniformly stunning.  So it's no long limb to traverse as I claim early Oscar nom slots for Clooney, Wilkinson and a killer Tilda Swinton; Gilroy, too, should be seeing February recognitions, if there really is any justice in the world.  The big trick of Michael Clayton is that it gets you to believe there might be.

Meanwhile, speaking of bright spots in the blogosphere: friend Kristen Havens has just launched a new blog that's a study in positivity.  Highlighting how the blogging world and the publishing world connect, The Post Pub celebrates writing and reading.  Kristen has seen fit (perhaps it's a fit of madness) to kick things into gear by posting an interview with yours truly, so if you'd like to continue your procrastinating (hey, what else could you be doing here?!), come have a look. 

The Movie That Isn't There

Watching the new Heartbreak Kid -- as opposed to the old Heartbreak Kid, which is well worth a look -- I had a peculiar sensation.  There were moments when I felt myself trying to peer through the screen to see another movie: the movie that wasn't there.

There was something fundamentally dark about the first film, written by black-humored Bruce Jay Friedman and Neil Simon at his most acerbic, and helmed by the great Elaine May with her usual sardonic acuity.  The original Kid was a thoroughly reprehensible young man named Lenny Cantrow, played by Charles Grodin in one of his few starring roles, and one wonders now in retrospect if it was the writers and director who did in his leading man career. 

Lenny, unmistakably Jewish, is also unmistakably wrong: on his honeymoon with a nice Jewish girl, he falls in love with a "shiksa goddess," a dream blonde played by Cybill Shepherd, and abandons his newlywed wife to pursue and seduce her.  We watch him do the wrong things for the worst reasons with the fascination due a particularly impassioned and inspired criminal getting away with murder.  So did Grodin's brilliance in fusing with this morally unsupportable character leave a bad taste in his public's mouth?

I don't believe that.  But evidently Ben Stiller does, or his people do.  His Eddie Cantrow, ethnically ambiguous (in spite of dad Jerry Stiller's presence), is actually right to do what he does: as the new version contrives it, his blonde honeymooning bride is suddenly revealed to be The Wife From Hell, so when Eddie stumbles into the easygoing company of a flirtatious, pretty young brunette who's as sweet as his wife is toxic, we're able to support his bad behavior.  Stiller is playing (as he did with great success in the Farrellys' Something About Mary) a put-upon twitching and wincing innocent, caught in a forgivable bind.

This, I suppose, is the cowardice that sometimes comes with stardom these days: it's assumed that we can't possibly empathize with a Wrong Guy anymore, so the protagonist a star portrays gets over-protected.  In this case, the strategem has backfired.  In whitewashing Cantrow, the Farrellys and their writers have neutered the dark, dangerous core of the movie.  And since we're no longer presented with an authentic too-human anti-hero, we become all the more aware of the mean-spirited flavor left in his wake. 

Taking the anti- out of our hero requires putting the blame elsewhere, which accounts for a strong strain of misogyny in the new Kid: the wife has to be wrong for the husband to seem right.  Psychotic in her irrationality and delusions, Lila (played by Malin Akerman) also torpedoes the story's credibility; it's hard to buy into the idea that 6 weeks into their relationship, Eddie's dream girl has so suddenly morphed into a demon.  But even if you accept this premise, the movie's women are too consistently derided (or romanticized, in the case of true love Miranda, played by Michelle Monaghan) for you to ignore the unsavory sexism that's enabled Stiller to come off... nice.

Interestingly, I passed on the Heartbreak Kid remake when it first came to my studio as a project some years ago because the screenply then presented was too slavishly close to the original: it read as if someone had simply run Simon's script through a 2000s vocabulary update program.  And what probably gave the current creative team the willies was clear to me then: I was surprised by what a dark and downbeat story this comedy really was, and noted in my coverage that the project's sensibility might seem more indie than mainstream to contemporary audiences.

When I heard what was purportedly the Farrelly's take, I was intrigued.  They were saying in interviews that the movie was now a "be careful what you wish for" scenario, its subtext a critique of how men fall in love with their eyes, and forget to look any further.  What if you could have the most beautiful woman you coveted, the story was asking -- and then had to deal with what lay behind what was only skin-deep?

Potentially an interesting thematic notion.  But that isn't really what the finished film is about.  The new Kid merely asks: when you've made the wrong choice, how do you get out of it?  And in the time-honored tradition of have-it-both-ways, don't-rock-the-boat mainstream Hollywood moviemaking, this bland retake embraces stereotypical rom-com values: we're asked to believe that Stiller and lovely Michelle are soul-mates for real (not that we've seen much evidence of this), and thus love's ends justify its means. 

Pitched at a farcical frantic pace, the movie's third act puts Stiller through a contrived and cartoonish series of hard-knock comeuppances before he can get the girl, but it's all lip service to some imagined moral balance board.  Our Eddie was good at the top, good even when he was being bad, and good, no matter how crazed, in the end.  But this calculation has effectively robbed us of a chance to identify with the badder side of human behavior -- to take a painfully funny look at what we're really like when we're at our worst.

I guess that's what got me staring into the screen, looking for a mirror, a resonance that wasn't there.  The first Kid came out of the same era that gave us such memorably, heartbreakingly flawed anti-heroes as Dog Day Afternoon's Sonny or Ratzo Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy -- movies brave enough to make us care about people we're not supposed to care for.  All dressed up to make its hero look good, the new remake doesn't give us enough to care about.  Finally, it has no heart to break.

When Sex Isn't Sexy

There's something a little strange going on in "It's not TV, it's HBO"-land these days.  While HBO looks in vain for a new Sopranos, over at "It's not HBO, it's AMC," Mad Men, the wholly-addictive show helmed by Sopranos alumni Matt Weiner, has become the most watchable series of the season.  Meanwhile HBO's new series Tell Me You Love Me has become what amounts to a cultural oddity: it's watchable in that dubious, "can't tear your eyes away from the car wreck" way, but you can't say -- in spite of all the explicit sex for which the series is already infamous-- that it's remotely sexy.

This is evidently supposed to be the point. The show, writer/producer Cynthia Mort's baby for better or worse, purports to be a study of modern marriage, and as Mort sees it, marriage and sexiness are antithetical.  We're privy to the (extremely) intimate details of the conjugal lives of three disparate couples, as well as the married life of these couples' therapist, played by the admirably ever-game Jane Alexander (who'da thunk she'd have to take off her clothes to get a part when she was well into the, um, mature end of her illustrious career?).  But we're not allowed to have our prurient interests piqued.

According to Mort -- alert the media -- marriage isn't easy.  Specifically, marriage is difficult when -- well past the bloom of courtship and the flurry of sexual activity that generally precedes a more decorous trot down the wedding aisle -- people have to settle into the serious business of living together, perhaps raising children, and somehow finding ways to keep their love alive.  If Tolstoy famously noted that each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way, each contemporary marriage, in Mort's view, is unhappy in its bedroom.

Let us count the ways.  One 40-something couple, played by Ally Walker and Tim DeKay, haven't had sex in over a year.  Another in their 30s, (Sonya Walger and Adam Scott) only have (rigorously scheduled, emotionally conflicted) sex in an attempt to have a baby.  The third -- 20-somethings engaged to be married (played by Michelle Borth and Luke Farrell Kirby) -- have passionate, down'n'dirty sex all the time, but the future of their union is in question because fiance Luke doubts that he'll be able to stay faithful to his future wife.  So their sex, albeit steamy, is suffused with anger, fear, sadness and desperation.  And even the sex between elderly Jane A. and her husband is fraught, because she's recently started seeing an old flame.

Are you turned on yet? 

Seriously: is there such a thing as good sex -- i.e. erotic and angst-free sex -- in Tell Me's universe?  Not in the three episodes I've seen, and I wouldn't bank on it showing up anytime soon.  And this is the thing I find perverse about the conception of the show.  It was instantly controversial due to its graphic and explicit portrayal of sexual intimacy; even the oldsters bare skin, and there's too much of everyone's genitalia glimpsed here and there to qualify as soft-core.  But the sex has been written, directed, shot and edited to be "realistic" -- i.e. willfully unromanticized and un-erotic -- so The Act is purposefully portrayed as being the opposite of pleasurable.

What a weird-ass approach to such subject matter: it's as if Mort and Co. are saying, "It's okay that we're pushing the envelope re: nudity and sex on TV, because Lord knows we're not out to arouse anybody, and hey, nobody who's nude and having sex here is having a good time!"  As an excuse for questionable behavior -- or a rationale for not providing an audience with genuine fun -- it's a bit like someone telling you they've cheated on their lover, but it doesn't matter because they didn't enjoy it.

Within a recent NY Times article (It Isn't a Real Sex Scene? I Still Need a Cigarette) that focuses on the difficulties experienced by actors when they're forced to enact such line-crossing acts, Ms. Mort had this to say about her intentions:

“The goal is to make it moving and emotional and intimate and, yes, uncomfortable at times, because not everyone is comfortable with sex,” she said. “You’re trying to capture that.”

Right.  We get it.  I'm being hoisted on my own petard here, because I've  always said (in my rom-com book and on this site) that the best kind of on-screen intimacy comes from having real characters involved, from not having characterization -- or the plot -- disappear as soon as the camera goes into the bedroom.  And the plus side of Tell Me lies in its willingness to take a courageous, unblinking look at all the little details of Marriage As We Know It, beyond its marital bed discomforts.  While each episode seems to ricochet from the truly interesting to the thuddingly banal, you want to give Tell Me its props for being more honest about what really does go on between consenting adults in a long-term relationship than what you generally see on both small screen and big. 

Still, I can't help being irked by what feels like the doggedly puritanical ethical bottom line here: apparently America still can't handle hot.  We can only show you the sexy stuff, the show is saying, if it isn't sexy.  In terms of pleasure, Tell Me You Love Me takes away before it even begins to give; though it comes on all "ooooh-are-we-naughty!" all the naughty bits come pre-spanked (and not in the good-nasty sense).  It's hard-R-rated with no rrrrrr -- it's sexual spinach.

But is it good for us?  Not necessarily.  Watching Tell Me, I find myself yearning for either the delicious guilt of European art-smut (e.g. Last Tango, The Lover, etc.) or the ticklish frisson of sublimated sexiness in a good old-fashioned screwball (e.g. Carole Lombard in just about anything, but especially Twentieth Century's pajamas)  -- you know, the kind of movies where sex, however illicit or off-screen, is... fun. 

Since when is there an error in "erotic?"  Are we still so un-evolved (in the US) that we're not ready to contemplate -- nay, enjoy -- the spectacle of edgy sex that's angst-free and pleasurably titillating?  Say it ain't so, Living Rom-Commers.  'Cause (call me kinky, call me crazy) I for one would like to think that married life can still be, well -- romantic.