Screwball…

I’m a fan of old black and white films, His Girl Friday, My Man Godfrey, You Can’t Take It With You; otherwise known as screwball comedies.

My Man Godfrey (1936)

I’m not sure when the term romantic-comedy was first coined as a film category. But I suppose they stem from the screwball comedies of the 30s/40s. Films generally tagged as romantic-comedies follow a basic formula:

Setup: The story sets up the two main characters; generally with their respective sidekicks, usually the ones with the punchlines or they are a punchline to the main character’s straight guy/gal.

Meet Cute: The two main characters encounter one another in what the writers hope the audience finds adorable. This doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be plausible (Kate & Leopold for instance).

What follows is a formula of clashing/one-liners/falling into some degree of infatuation/some misunderstanding/moving apart/reuniting. This almost always involves: a wedding, a dance/musical number, and someone pregnant going into labour, and or declaring they’re pregnant.

There have been smart versions of the romantic-comedy: When Harry Met Sally. There have been some that tried to break away from the formula somewhat: Black Book, Forces of Nature.

However, generally they follow the above formula and fans of this category expect it. So then, after my man and I tortured ourselves by dialing up, My Best Friend’s Girlfriend, I wondered what the writer, filmmaker and Kate Hudson, were thinking.

The audience for romantic-comedies are usually predominantly women. There are men who enjoy these too if the film is accessible to them, doesn’t insult them, or has a slight coming-of-age self-enlightenment tone to it such as The Devil Wears Prada. Basically I use my man as a gauge for most men; he expects fun, funny, smart.

MBFG starts with Dane Cook being nasty to women to hide the nastiness of the women’s boyfriends… then ends with him being nasty to his love (Hudson) by openly being nasty to her family; including dropping his pants and asking her mother for a blow job.

Wow.

I’m a film buff, film grad, writer and I would say I watch 200+ films a year, no exaggeration, and given the expected formula I outlined above, I have never seen something quite so off-the-mark to put it mildly.

Who, I thought, is this film aimed at? Oh, I expect the chest-beating mouth breathers found that hilarious. So any of those types who got dragged to the expected romantic-comedy with their girlfriends would have been relieved their time wasn’t completely wasted. But let’s for the moment say, f-ck them: Because really, f-ck them. They get their Harold and Kumars, they get their puby hair in the hummus joke films; the romantic-comedy isn’t FOR them.

The film’s story resolution is that Kate Hudson publicly humiliates him and he in turn her and then they embrace. A perfectly attractive successful, intelligent women reduced herself to the crass gutter for a guy who asked her mother for a blow job at her sister’s wedding.

In He’s Just Not That Into You, the film attempts to expose the games and lies, and show that both men and women can be jerks to one another. It isn’t a great film but as for romantic-comedies it does what it’s supposed to do, and I felt was at least smarter than most lately (I’m looking at you 27 Dresses). Whoever wrote and thought that MBFG would make a good romantic-comedy should be slapped. That’s it: Just slapped; then ignored forever.

My man usually thinks DC is funny, so I asked if he liked the film. He did not. And yes, he was telling me the truth.