Are men taking over romantic comedies?

By Sarah Sluis

Yesterday, I caught Going the Distance, a well-executed, not-so-painful romantic comedy (at least according to me, not my viewing companion). That's pretty much the best the genre can hope for nowadays. Afterwards, this lackluster film inspired some discussion about romantic comedies we have enjoyed over the past few years. It was hard to name ANY.

Last year's twee (500) Days of Summer got a mention, as did Cyrus, I Love You, Man and the Judd Apatow movies. "But those don't really count," my companion said. "They're kind of the death of romantic comedies."

What all these movies have in common is that fact that they're guy romantic comedies. They're also about male friendships, in the case of the Apatow movies and I Love You, Man. Which makes them, technically, bromances and not romantic comedies.

Looking at back at some of my favorite romantic comedies from the past 20-30 years, however, I realized that a lot of them had memorable male characters. They also told the story from the male point-of-view or a combined male/female point-of-view. (Some of these favorites include Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally, The American President, Jerry Maguire, The Wedding Singer, There's Something About Mary...)

Why are these types of romantic comedies so rewarding?

1) Speaking as a woman, there's always a level of curiosity about what the other half is thinking. When you're given a male point-of-view, women can see what's going on on the other side.

2) Also, when we see a male character in a romantic comedy, it's usually showing him pursuing or pining over a girl. Given a choice between seeing an empathetic man waiting by the phone for his love interest to call and a woman waiting for a man to call, I'll take the first one, hands down.

3) It's a sign that characters are well-developed. In many of the forgettable romantic comedies that I've seen over the past few years, I can barely remember the leading man. But a well-written, well-acted character can come across even with very little screen time.

Going the Distance tried to incorporate some of these techniques. Justin Long had plenty of screen time. We see him pick up the phone and call Drew Barrymore after his first date, not her waiting around for him to call (she also doesn't store his number in her phone, making her seem like the less interested one). The cast of male characters bolstered up our understanding of Long, and made him an equal character to Barrymore. Unfortunately, the whole movie lacked a certain naturalness and felt artificial, despite the best of intentions.

I've been eyeing the "bromance" trend for some time, and I wonder if this reflects a shift in American culture. Lots of older screwball romantic comedies, for example, involve prim women who are finally forced to acknowledge their love for someone else, which seems like a reflection of what was expected at the time. Now, it seems that romantic comedies often show male characters becoming more vulnerable and less "masculine." It's still a little transgressive and unusual, but also shows how American culture is changing over time.

You got rights to that? Hollywood taps unlikely sources for movie material

By Sarah Sluis

It used to be that movies were based on original ideas or adapted from a book or play. When a movie drew inspiration from actual events, they were usually concerning historical figures or events known to the general public--Gandhi, true crime, or that thinly veiled portrait of Hearst in Citizen Kane. Moreover, Hollywood didn't have a problem fictionalizing the objects and places in everyday life. People used detergent and ate cereal with made-up brand names. In National Lampoon's Vacation, they went to Walley World, even though everyone knew they were talking about Disneyland.

But times have changed. Nowadays, Hollywood frequently picks up the rights to story fragments, objects, games, action figures, and newspaper articles, and then creates a story around them. Sometimes they are well-known (Monopoly), and other times they are relatively obscure (the pickup of a newspaper article about a family that had architects build puzzles into their house).

The latest such project is the pickup of a WEBSITE. You heard me, a U-R-L. DreamWorks has acquired the rights to website Musunahi (www.musunahi.com/), the Museum of Supernatural History. The studio plans to create a story that will "center on the curator of a covert organization known as the Museum of SuperNatural History who must seek out and protect the world's best-kept secrets."

Why not just bypass acquiring the rights to the website but create a fictional version of the same thing? One answer lies in the proliferation of reality television. People love "based on actual events," and teasing out what's real from what's not in reality shows, a challenge that's increased as the shows have become more and more scripted. Having a connection to the real world in a fictional story can ramp up an audience's level of interest if it's done right. Plus, for a movie about aliens and Loch Ness monsters, blurring the line between reality and fiction makes even more sense.

Then there's the marketing consideration. It will be much easier for DreamWorks to mobilize the Musunahi community if they don't have to convince fans the movie is relevant to them: they will already know that the movie is directly based on the museum's material.

But back to the acquisition of a website. What does it say about our culture that movies now hook us because of their things instead of people? A biography of a glamourous songstress may inspire those who want to be like her, those who want to learn about her, or those fascinated with the time period. An object can have the same effect. In the age of user-generated content, people may be more interested in seeing depictions of objects, things, sites they consume rather than a remote historical or celebrity figure.