Living the Romantic Comedy

Robots in Love

Yeah, yeah -- you've heard enough about Wall-E, and you don't need yet another blogger, critic, or moviegoing civilian (though it would be nice to hear from the android community) to tell you how wonderful it is. Hardened hearts have been warmed, grown men have wept, etc.  But amidst all the Ultimate Family Summer Fun! and Best Sci-Fi Since ET! kudos, you may not have gotten the inside line particular to our purview: to date, Pixar's latest animated feature is also the best romantic comedy of the year.

I heard this sentiment first expressed in an e-mail from a student only weeks out of my most recent "Writing the Romantic Comedy" course (either I'm a first-rate brainwasher, or the things I've been saying in there actually do make sense to people).  I'll let Dana Carsley tell it: "Sure, Wall-E helps us save the planet but what this movie is REALLY about is Wall-E's love for Eve and how he overcomes all the hurdles that take them from cute meet to joyful defeat."

That is correct, Grasshopper, and I thoroughly support what she went on to say: "[The movie] has endearing and engaging made-for-each other leads, the highest of stakes, sincerity of emotion, and very visual storytelling. And it successfully conveys all this without much dialogue!"

Kind of like Chaplin and Keaton's best rom-com work, and this leads me to ask (with steam blowing out my ears): how is it that Chaplin's City Lights just made the top of AFI's recent Best Romantic Comedies list, and yet, bizarrely, Sydney Pollack's Tootsie didn't rate at all? 

My answer?  Many people who ought to know better wouldn't recognize a romantic comedy if it ran to the airport and stopped them from getting on a plane to declare how much it loved them.

Perception is the problem.  According to AFI, a romantic comedy is defined as "a genre in which the development of a romance leads to comic situations."  That's not so bad so far as it goes, but let's note for the record that oh, EIGHT out of AFI's Top Ten begin their stories as comedies, with comic situations aplenty unfolding in full guffaw gear, before the movie's central romance develops (I'll grudgingly concede that Adam's Rib and Philadelphia Story have their romances established before the laughs start).

I define a romantic comedy as 1) a comedy whose central plot is embodied in a romantic relationship, and 2) is driven by the central question: Will these two people become a couple?

Given this thesis, many a movie is a breath mint and a candy mint -- many a romantic comedy is also a musical (High School Musical), an action thriller (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), a teen coming-of-age pic (Juno).  Such hybrids are the coin of the realm by now.  But when the climax of a comedic story is determined by what happens between its two romantic leads, even if it's a high concept, device-driven movie, it's fundamentally a romantic comedy.
Groundhog Day's log line starts off as "A TV weatherman gets stuck living through the same February 2nd forever, until..."  Until what?  "...Until he falls for his producer, and by learning what love really means, finally escapes his peculiar fate."

Thus, Wall-E (story about the last robot left on Earth...) is a romantic comedy.  Tootsie (story about a guy who dresses up as a woman...) is a romantic comedy.  Enchanted (story about an animated fairy-tale princess who gets thrown into the real world...)?  Romantic comedy.  Zelig, Prizzi's Honor, Princess Bride: None of the above may have been pitched, sold and advertised as rom-coms, but that is what they are.

The pervasive industry narrow-mindedness about what a romantic comedy can be is largely what's led us  to the plethora of mediocre-to-awful formulaic "guy and a girl on a date"-centric rom-coms of the past decade, where it's all about the romance -- they talk, they walk, they kiss, they talk -- giving our genre the reputation of being little more than cinematic Ambien.

No, you can have a big-screen, big action movie that's a rom-com, too.  And this is why I'm constantly telling students of the form: if you want to write a good romantic comedy, you don't have to write a "romantic comedy."  Write a story where love is the transformative power that changes everything.  It can be about be about gun-runners, it can be about golf), it can take place hundreds of years in post-apocalyptic future Earth and outer space, starring robots instead of humans.

Hey, don't just take my word for it -- this neat compendium of robot love stories shows Wall-E is in a grand tradition, and better yet, here's Wall-E writer/director Andrew Stanton, who in a fab interview, has this to say about his movie:

Somewhere halfway I realized what the theme is... the point I was trying to push with these two programmed robots was the desire for them to try and figure out what the point of living was. It took these really irrational acts of love to sort of discover them against how they were built. I said, "That's it! That's my theme: Irrational love defeats life's programming." I realized that that's a perfect metaphor for real life. We all fall into our habits, our routines and our ruts, consciously or unconsciously to avoid living. To avoid having to do the messy part. To avoid having relationships with other people, of dealing with the person next to us. That's why we can all get on our cellphones and not have to deal with one another. I thought, "That's a perfect amplification of the whole point of the movie."

Call it sci-fi, animation, comedy, a family movie, sure -- but Wall-E's primary creator says it's all about the love.
 

Blogoversary #3

Strange but true -- whether one sees this blog as a relative newbie (three years, is that all?!) or yet another Thing That Wouldn't Leave (he's still blogging?!), the time for celebration is nigh once again: Living RomCom turns 3 this week. 

Per tradition, what follows is a "Best of 2007-2008 Posts" summary, so that those of you who truly do have leisure time on your hands (and/or you writers desperate for another procrastination pursuit) can troll and cruise these recent archives to your rom-commer heart's content.  (You can of course also visit my first Blogoversary and the Second Blogoversary, to find all the precious goodies annotated therein.)

Movies & Reviews

Cutting to the chase, did we see any good romantic comedies since last June?  Well, "good" is a relative term, as this post on the five tenets of movie-viewing subjectivity explains.  But there were some high spots, as acknowledged in 2007's Asta Awards: the delightful musical romantic comedy Enchanted, the coming-of-age/teen rom-com hybrid Juno, and the too traditional for some but I-thought-it-was-fun Dan in Real Life.

The middling realm of rom-com-dom was occupied by the estrogen-driven 27 Dresses and Sex and the City, along with the testosterone-powered Forgetting Sarah Marshall.  Romantic Comedy Bummer of the past 12 months?  Clearly The Heartbreak Kid. Living RomCom interviewed the director of the noble genre tweaker Definitely, Maybe, and we observed the official emergence of the Bromantic Comedy (i.e. a rom-com about the love between two heterosexual men) as exemplified wonderfully in the French My Best Friend and the not-so-wonderful American I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

As for films reviewed outside of the rom-com region, most memorable was Michael Clayton; the worst and best in recent memory? Indy 4 and the indie pic The Visitor.

The Romantic Comedy Genre

Trends and issues discussed included This Cliche Must Die (yet... it's alive!!!), the quest for Romantic Comedy Heroines, the oft-reported, yet-to-be-true Death of the Genre, and the Whither Chick Flicks? question (which may have been answered by Sarah and crew, see Sex, above).

Writing & Screenwriting

We explored a fundamental philosophy of crafting authentic characters, posed a challenge to cautious writers, explored cinematic storytelling via Oscar-nominated screenplays and went with the best film history tome of the decade thus far into Movie Book Heaven.

In Memoriam

The past twelve months saw the sad passing of Antonioni and Bergman, Minghella and Pollack; the latter director had received tribute in this piece on Tootsie, part of our now-ongoing series of Romantic Comedy Classic posts (see sidebar).

Culture & Current Events

Looming large in this blog's past year was the Writers' Strike, which was perhaps addressed best in these posts done at the outset and in the midst of it.

Personal Bests

Finally, two major experiences in the Mernit World may bear perusal. Tater and I went to Burning Man (and all you got was these three posts).  And my first novel was published... leading to the inevitable ruminations on the Realities of All That.

There you are and there you have it -- highlights of the third Living the Romantic Comedy year.  Coming up soon: a Rom-Com Classics look at AFI's #1 Romantic Comedy winner... and who knows what else?  Here's your chance to tell me what you'd like to see.  Living RomCom wants to know.

Yes, We Can

Is starting hard?  You know it is.  I don't know what you do when you start, but I clean my desk... I make a lot of stupid appointments that I make sound important...  Avoidance, delay, denial...  I'm always scared that I'm not gonna know what to do.  It's a terrifying moment.

A familiar sentiment, no doubt, to anyone reading this who happens to be a writer, or an artist in any medium.  And chances are, given the particular fear that's voiced here, you'd reckon that the person speaking is a neophyte, or at least, someone without a great deal of experience in his or her chosen field.

Think again: these are Frank Gehry's first words at the beginning of Sydney Pollack's wonderful documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry.  I was heartened to hear the foremost architect in the world owning up to this kind of novice-worthy terror at the top: the hands-down toughest moment any of us face when we're embarking upon a new project.  I was doubly pleased to hear what he said next:

And then when I start, I'm always amazed: Oh, that wasn't so bad.

The tone of wry humility is typical of Gehry, a living legend who has set the 21st Century's bar for buildings with his museum in Bilbao (and in Disney Hall, has gifted Los Angeles with its first boast-worthy landmark).  But this statement, too, has the ring of familiarity.  I've been there.  Haven't you?

Starting may be the hardest part for writers.  There's something about that blank page that can really bring on the scary for even the most experienced of scribes. And weird but true: no matter how many times I've faced it, each time, I go through very much the same three-beat process he's talking about.  First comes the fear and trembling and sickness unto death, then the big leap into the void... and soon after, that sense of relief, however fleeting: huh, I think, kinda crappy but there' s something there -- it's a beginning, at least.

It's an experience I share with my journalist honey, Tater, as well with most writers I know, and I share Mr. Gehry's expression of it with you as I embark upon another beginning.  After fumphing around with it for over half a year (a couple pages here and there -- Avoidance, delay, denial), this week I'm starting my second novel in earnest.  For me, with summer arrives the opportunity to get into some Real Work before the regular working year kicks in again come September (what did you expect from a Calvinist Jew, a couple of months floating round the pool in an inflatable donut?).

And having done it once before (my first novel took me over four years to write), I know that the Real Work is no day at the beach.  I also know, having not exactly taken the reading public by storm with my first effort, that the rewards can be a lot more ephemeral than say, certified fame and fortune.

That's why hearing Frank voice his fears (he doesn't know what he's gonna do?!) makes me feel a little better.  It gives me hope.  Knowing that writing a novel -- in the immortal words of novelist E.L. Doctorow -- is like driving at night in the fog: you can only see as far as your headlights, I like hearing that even the giants among us get trepidacious at the top of such a long trip.  And then they start the engine.  And sooner or later, find themselves saying Oh, that wasn't so bad.

The odds are against us, any one of us who tries to realize a dream on that blank page.  We know we might end up stuck in a deep ditch, wheels spinning; we know how easy it is to lose heart.  All of us who've faced such a struggle have heard the voice (often our own) that tells us you can't get there from here.  But as a certain popular inspirational figure of our times likes to remind us:

...Where we are met with cynicism and doubt and fear and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words -- yes, we can.

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Sex?

It's actually pretty simple, the pros and cons of The Movie That's Not For Men.  If you were never a fan of Sex and the City the TV series, chances are good that you'll find Sex and the City the blown-up movie bewilderingly bloated at nearly two and a half hours.  If you were a fan, you may be up for another hour of it.

Rarely does a movie fall so definitively down gender lines, and I've been enjoying the conversation it's engendered across the chasm. Women embrace it, unless they're in the critical camp that's always resented the show's oddly retro values (i.e. for all the girl power Sex ostensibly embodies, the girls just wanna have guys); generally men would rather watch a Laker game.

As a heterosexual male who got hooked on the series by the time Baryshnikov, Bradshaw and Big had their showdown, I'll confess that there are aspects -- endemic to the core of the whole Sex ethos -- I never did and never will get.  Those Blahniks, for example.  Breathes there a straight man with soul so femme that he can fervently embrace the crux and climax of a whole movie being about a pair of shoes?  I think not.

Only one other male friend of mine has seen Sex, and he noted that the men in the movie come off surprisingly well, and in almost all of the story lines actually hold the moral high ground, while the women spend half the movie stuck in emotional turmoil that ultimately dissolves into an eleventh hour 180 degree reversal: I know I felt that way, they say in the end (and put you and me and everyone else through hell while I was feeling that way), but I guess finally I feel like this.

It's just so... womanly of them (it's their perogative to change their minds).  One way to sell Sex to men, I'll wager, would be as sex (or gender) education; if you want to know what a woman wants, here's a movie that certainly offers clues.

Meanwhile, the wish fulfillment fantasy of being part of a perfect female foursome, of moving into Manhattan real estate heaven, of achieving fabulosity at over-forty, is clearly the stuff that's made this glossy dream pull 56.8 millions and counting out of America's purses.  And love it or hate it, I say more power to it. 

Too long, too-shmong, even a man who doesn't get it would have to agree: isn't too much Sex better than none at all?  Women make up more than half the moviegoing audience (87 million in 2007, as opposed to 85 million men), so why not invite them back for more?  I was surprised that The Devil Wears Prada's success wasn't a wake-up call.  Now that its 27 million dollar opening's been more than doubled, the men who run things are suddenly jump-starting all those female-driven projects they'd been neglecting for years. 

Same as it ever was, I guess: the guys are obsessed with size.

Indy v. Indie: Steven Spielberg Thinks You're an Idiot, but Thomas McCarthy Knows Better

...I know, I know, this is all so last week, and Living RomCom should be reviewing We're the Female Audience, Hear Us Roar (aka Sex and the City) right about now, but I'm waiting to see Sex with my honey, who's away in Democracy School.  So instead, this past weekend I went with a few friends to see a little bittie indie pic called The Visitor, which now tops my short list of the Best Movies of 2008.  And having viewed it in the wake of having recently had my consciousness cotton-candied by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Brain-Dead, I've decided it's time for a good old-fashioned rant'n'rave.

Things One Thinks About After Seeing The Visitor:
The nature of friendship, the roots of empathy, the tenuousness of our supposed status quo (how an entire life can change in an instant), the awesome gulf between Americans and their immigrant population, loneliness as a portal to life or death, the beauty of women, the transformative power of masculine vulnerability, how music could save the world, that there's no such thing as an Average White Guy (or Average Person of Any Color, for that matter), the wisdom of understatement and trusting in an audience's intelligence, how post-9/11 government policies have crippled our capacity for compassion and decency.

Things One Thinks About After Seeing Indy 4:
What were they thinking?


[Warning: the following contains SPOILERS re: Indy 4 (come to think of it, the whole movie is its own sort of spoiler), but if you're really concerned about Indy 4 spoilers you're probably reading the wrong blog.]

My post-Indy 4 experience reminds me of an old '80s gag about cocaine: When you do a line of coke, you feel like a new man; problem is, ten minutes later the new man wants to feel like a new man.  For the couple of hours that I spent watching Indy 4, I was intermittently entertained.  But the moment my heels hit the aisle's carpet, the major disappointment and misgivings started seeping in.  That's the peculiar, dubious brilliance of Spielberg: he's such a superb technician that he makes anything he points a lens at absorb your attention, momentarily.  Armed with a masterfully manipulative moving camera and the best production team money can buy, he imbues a given scene with a vivid, hyper-movie-movie reality.  He's a genius of Sell, and it's only when the hawking's over -- when you've put the coke spoon down, so to speak -- that you realize how little of reality (in Indy 4, it's next to nothing) was actually there.

I'm as much a fan of escapism as anyone, but as any writer knows, the more far-fetched or farcical a story is, the stronger its grounding rules need to be.  Not ten minutes after seeing Indy, I found my figurative jaw dropping at just how many fundamental rules it had broken.  There are "only in an alternate universe" howlers like Indy's ability to walk away from an atom bomb blast completely unscathed (strange, but in a movie obsessed with such scientific phenomena as magnetism, there is no such thing as radiation poisoning), and the idea that five people crashing over three Niagara-sized waterfalls in quick succession would walk away merely wet.

Indy 4's fundamental narrative error lies in its having removed any vestige of genuine jeopardy for its protagonists, and with that loss, sacrificing all tension and suspense.  It should also be noted that conspicuously M.I.A. in this movie are emotionally involving relationships between credible human beings (add the coulda-been-great return of Karen Allen's character here to cinema's Great Missed Opportunities list).  Yes, it's got a couple of bravura set pieces in it, but ultimately Indy 4 boils down to a whole lot of hoopla about absolutely zero.

It's rife with mistakes that would embarrass a rookie writer, such as the inordinate screen time used to establish that teenaged Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) packs a switchblade, that he's good with a knife, is itching to use it, that he's, y'know, got a knife on him... and then, but for one throwaway gag about his "bringing a knife to a gun fight," the lack of any obligatory pay-off scene in the movie where Mutt uses his knife. Similarly, an early scene suggests that villainness Cate Blanchett has psychic powers, and said powers never materialize. 

We can chalk up some of this oblivious sloppiness to what happens when you've had untold drafts of a project over nearly 20 years of development and perhaps as many writers.  But were Steven and George not even in the editing room?  When you cut a pay-off out of a movie, you go back and cut down (or eliminate) its setup: that's the Filmmaking 101 know-how we expect from the supposed Best in the Business.

It's shite like this that leaves you thinking, What were they thinking?  After some deliberation, I can only come to one conclusion: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas think we won't care, that we won't notice, that it doesn't matter.  In other words, they think we're idiots.


It's for this reason, among many, that I want to draw your attention to one Thomas McCarthy, the writer and director of The Visitor (and before that, The Station Agent).  McCarthy, working with a budget that was probably equal to a couple days of craft service table food on the Indy set, has created a moving, disturbing, ohmyGod thought-provoking film that lingers in the head and heart for days afterward.  Unlike Indy 4, it's about something, and it takes place in the world we live in.  In fact, it does what the best art is supposed to do: it helps us see the familiar with new eyes, while opening our eyes to the unfamiliar.

Family, and what it means, is central to The Visitor's concerns.  It has the audacity to suggest that there really might be such a thing as a family of man and an actual global community; it believes in hope, even as it acknowledges the prevalence of hopelessness in our strife-torn life.  McCarthy (pictured right) gives his audience the benefit of the doubt -- he trusts that we can understand ambivalence, comprehend conflicted emotions, that we can hold more than one feeling or thought in our consciousness at the same time.

While the often ridiculous Indy 4 script piles on chunks of tedious exposition trying to explain back story nonsense that means nothing to us, McCarthy's movie leaves things out: deliberately, intelligently, banking on the radical notion that we'll be smart enough to get it -- get what's in a glance, a gesture, what's implied when a scene ends early, letting us fill in the gap as it jumps to the next meaningful moment.

Impeccably cast, beautifully shot and directed, The Visitor is just the kind of sharp, poignant, devastatingly affecting little indie pic that all too often slips under the radar (its forgettable title and lack of marquee names won't help -- though fans of Six Feet Under will recognize and appreciate lead Richard Jenkins).  But it's timely (as well as timeless) in its concerns, refreshingly substantive -- and even romantic and deeply funny, too.  So I urge you, as the usual summertime behemoths roll loudly in and out of town, to catch it if you can.

Meanwhile, I can't help being amused, in a healthily mean-spirited way, by how Sex and the City just totally trounced Indy 4 at the weekend box office, surpassing even conservative expectations (and did Living RomCom not tell you that it would?  It did).  While Sex is certainly no indie, and may not even be a good movie, its success at least demonstrates that assuming your audience is made up of low-IQ suckers is no longer a sureshot proposition (it's pretty telling when a relatively low budget feature that isn't aimed at the famed under-25 male demographic bests a 1000-pound gorilla's second weekend).  Who knows?  There may be some life left in the moviegoing mind, after all.