Entertainment Weekly has a list of romantic comedy cliches it wants to ban forever from the wisecracking best friend to the adorably uncontrollable dog, the trying-on-clothes montage, the makeover, the chase through the airport (have they ever heard of cell phones?) and the lip-synching. I’m already on record as being opposed to the last two. But I think most people who buy tickets to romantic comedies expect and want those conventions to be there, don’t you?
“Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” feels like ghosts of movies past, with a been-there, seen-that feeling that goes far beyond its familiar appropriation of the structure of “A Christmas Carol.” It is not as deep as Matthew McConaughey’s dimples. He plays Connor Mead, a photographer so fabulously successful that he captures a magazine cover with one click of the shutter, while he mesmerizes every female in a mile radius into doing all but levitating out of their clothes every time he looks at them.
At his brother’s wedding, Connor is visited by the ghost of their guardian, world-class womanizer Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas), who tells him he will be visited by three ghosts to help him learn about what he needs to change in his life. The first is Allison, played by”Superbad’s” very gifted Emma Stone, with a frizz of hair, a mouthful of braces, and some serious 80’s fashion victim attire. She takes him from his childhood love Jenny to the early lessons from Uncle Wayne in (1) picking up as many women as possible and (2) feeling as little for them as possible.” He relives his conquests and liaisons and his romance with Jenny (Jennifer Garner). Meanwhile, he manages to wreck havoc on the wedding plans.
The primary problem here is that the movie wants to have Connor both ways, a heartless but irresistible lady-killer who is callously offensive, breaking up with three girls at once via conference call and telling everyone at the wedding that marriage is a disaster. He’s less an emotional Ebenezer Scrooge than he is a throwback to those cads-just-waiting-to-be-tamed ring-a-ding-ding movies Frank Sinatra used to make like The Tender Trap and “Come Blow Your Horn.”
But we’ve come a long way, baby, since then, and the idea of the love ’em and leave ’em Lothario is neither as charming or as believable as it once was. Even McConaughey’s dimples can’t keep Connor from seeming more creepy than magnetic. The endless rows of women who are ready, willing, and able to do anything but act with any semblance of intelligence or dignity come across as embarrassing and sadly in need of some “he’s just not that into you” lessons. We cannot connect to the movie because it is impossible to feel any sympathy for Connor or root for his happiness. Fred Ward is nicely flinty as the prospective father-in-law but poor Lacey Chabert can’t help sounding shrill as the kind of bride who freaks out about every detail. Even the divine Anne Archer can’t do much with a cougar-role that gives her little do do but murmur knowingly. The highlights of the film are Stone’s teenage ghost and especially Garner. Her grace, elegance, and authenticity make us wish for her to do a lot better than the guy with the ghosts. And a lot better than this lackluster and formulaic script.
I will be hosting a Washington DC-area screening of the new Renee Zellwegger-Harry Connick, Jr. romantic comedy, “New In Town” later this month and have tickets for the first five people to send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com
Bertram Pincus, D.D.S. sees dead people. And he’s very crabby about it.
Bertram (Ricky Gervais, creator and star of the original British version of “The Office”) doesn’t much like any kind of people, living or dead. He likes being a dentist because the people he deals with mostly have their mouths full of cotton. After a bad reaction to the anesthetic during a colonoscopy has him “dead” for seven minutes, he can suddenly see ghosts everywhere and they start following him around like the Verizon wireless network. They all want him to do something so that they can rest in peace but he has no more interest in helping them than he does with the living humans in his life, including his partner, his patients, or the very pretty woman who lives in his building.
The story is creaky and predicatable — a little humiliation humor here, a little learning that it’s relationships that matter there, not to mention the colonoscopy humor. Director David Koepp is better known as a screenwriter (“Spider-Man” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”). The script is over-long and clunky and his visual sense is a little claustrophobic and sit-com-ish. But Gervais and Leoni are so completely charming that they make it work. It isn’t often that you see a couple really connect in a movie. Usually that moment is glossed over with a syrupy montage or having them discover that they both collect bottle caps or something. But here the easy and genuine (and sometimes politically incorrect) laughter Bertram and Gwen share keeps us smiling with them.
Do romantic comedies create and foster impossible expectations? Are women doomed to disappointment when no man can possibly measure up to Lloyd Dobbler (Say Anything), William Thacker (Notting Hill) or Joe Fox (You’ve Got Mail) — or Cary Grant in anything?
Researchers at the Family and Personal Relationships Laboratory at Heriot Watt University in Scotland have concluded that may be the problem. In a new paper about the influence of romantic movies on people’s expectations about relationships, the researchers studied 40 films released between 1995 and 2005 and found that they conveyed to those in the audience a sense that the best relationships achieved a level of understanding that did not require the kind of communication that is necessary for real-life relationships.
Dr. Bjarne Holmes, who led the research, said: “We are not being killjoys – we are not saying that people shouldn’t watch these movies. But we are saying that it would be helpful if people were more aware and more critical of the messages in these films. The problem is that while most of us know that the idea of a perfect relationship is unrealistic, some of us are still more influenced by media portrayals than we realize.”
I do not believe anyone takes or should take these studies any more seriously than they take relationship advice from Julia Roberts movies. In other words, both are fun and sometimes provocative and can even offer genuine insights that can help illuminate relationship issues — finding the courage to take a risk, making love the top priority of your life, valuing yourself enough to value others — but by definition, movies have to take short-cuts to indicate important passages in a relationship or we’d be there for weeks. That’s what a montage is all about — we see the couple splashing each other on the beach and marveling over the goodies at an outdoor market while some sprightly pop song plays on the soundtrack and we accept that they are in love; that doesn’t mean we expect that in our own lives. This goes back way before movies. Even Shakespeare had to save time by having his lovers fall for each other at first sight, though he at least had them describe it beautifully.
I would guess that there’s something of a chicken and egg problem here. Those audience members who are attracted to romantic comedies (especially some of the second-rate ones in this study) are likely to have more of a tendency to, well, romanticize. But if they are really paying attention, they will see that one of the most important messages in any romantic film is that the best way to see those movies is while sharing popcorn with someone you love — and that the best part is talking to that person about it afterward.
If you are careful in observing the lessons from movies and other great stories about love in books, plays, operas, songs, and even paintings, you can find a true soulmate who makes all of the relationship ups and downs into life’s greatest adventure, someone who laughs with you, listens to you, and inspires you, and still holds hands when you go to the movies after more than 30 years. I’ve been lucky enough to find someone who is all of that and more.
and “Come Blow Your Horn.”
), William Thacker (
) or Joe Fox (
) — or Cary Grant in anything?