Friday, February 8, 2008
Film Romantically disinclined
Posted by David Lee Simmons on Fri, Feb 8, 2008 at 11:29 PM
(© 2008 20th Century Fox)
For my money, the New York Times' A.O. Scott is one of the best film critics out there, right along with our own Felicia Feaster and Curt Holman, as well as Ty Burr and Anthony Lane. Which is why I enjoyed his recent piece on romantic comedies, inspired by his cheeky review of Fool's Gold (reviewed here on PopSmart by Allison C. Keene), but also includes 27 Dresses (pictured) and Dan in Real Life.
The beauty of Scott's take on the crumbling genre that is romantic comedy is that it transcends the predictable "they don't make movies like they used to" grumpiness of these types of essays. (Though I do believe that's true in this case.) Maybe it's because they don't make the ACTORS like they used to, pointing a finger at the lovely, tanned co-stars Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey …
They are, for sure, better-looking than the rest of us, but in their screen incarnations almost programmatically less interesting.The actresses are spunky and sweet, but lacking in the vinegar that made Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve or Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night so definitively sexy. Those ladies were not always nice, and neither were their gentleman counterparts, who could be sarcastic, brutish and domineering when the mood struck.
By contrast, the romantic comedy leading men of today are the kind of nice guy — the Ralph Bellamy type — whom these earlier heroines would have triumphed by rejecting. The vision of love they embraced was not comfort and affirmation but a kind of grand, spirited struggle, what used to be called the battle of the sexes.
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