After spending Monday on Potter watch, it's nice to return to reality in movies. At least as real as romantic comedies can be.
Don't you wish you could fall in love like Hollywood says people do? Movies tell us that the couples who bicker/banter for all but the last five minutes, do extraordinarily dumb things to impress/fool each other, and make it through the obligatory, messy last-reel crisis are bound for lifelong happiness.
There was a newspaper article a few years ago that I'd pull out when teaching college classes on the rom-com genre, relating how a lovestruck California guy was arrested for his latest stunt to impress the woman he had a crush upon. Turned out that disguising himself as a cable TV serviceman to be closer to her was a wee bit too close to stalking for comfort.
Previously he had attempted a ruse to get her on a plane flight to the Caribbean, frame her new boyfriend to get him out of the picture and serenade her at work. He swore he didn't know how the new beau's house had caught fire.
When the police asked why he did all this, the man replied that those kinds of things always work in the movies.
(500) Days of Summer aims to change that impression, managing the feat with such charming precision that I've seen it twice and loved it both times. It's a movie telling viewers right off the bat that it's a boy-meets-girl story "but you should know up front that this isn't a love story." Then it proceeds to bat around every romantic comedy convention: the "meet cute," the characters so perfect in mind and body that it's a sham to believe they can't find dates, and ultimately the resolution making everything work at the finale.
(500) Days of Summer sometimes operates like a fantasy -- an impromptu dance routine in a park is one of my favorite scenes this year -- yet always keeps it real. It's a movie unafraid of admitting its influences, especially Woody Allen, with a brief Bergmanesque portrait of despair, and a scene when the screen splits between the hero's expectations of what will happen when he visits the woman, and the reality. The Graduate inspires an early one-liner, a couple of camera angles, then uses Benjamin and Elaine's own fadeout to underscore the uncertainty of what this couple is doing.
Brilliant stuff.
I love this movie (opening locally on July 31), so getting the chance to chat today with its director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber is something to anticipate. It's for a story I'm planning on romantic comedy conventions, and their crafty detours around them. But I could use a hand.
What are the rom-com cliches that get on your nerves, or perhaps worm their way into your heart? The wacky sidekicks? The grandmotherly adviser who has seen it all? Casting beautiful celebrities who can't/won't lose by the fadeout? The soundtrack of classic love songs heard too often? The "Love Boat" construction of first-quarter introductions, second-quarter romance, third-quarter crises and fourth-quarter kissing and making up?
Discuss among yourselves.
Steve Persall is the movie critic for the St. Petersburg Times. He was conceived behind a drive-in movie theater his father operated and raised in projection booths and concession stands. He doesn't care how you did it up north.
A cliche I hate - clumsy women. The 'oh, isn't he cute, oops, I'm going
to walk into the table/wall/waiter, or trip over the curb, the dog, or down the steps (bonus points if it's bus steps, then you get the humiliation of tripping AND the doors shutting on you).'
Posted by: Princess Di | July 14, 2009 at 10:11 AM