As a child, I enjoyed fairy tales where the prince always hooked up with the princess at the end of the story, and everyone got a happy ending. Romantic comedies are much like fairy tales – one expects the hero and the heroine to get together. They are predictable, and exactly what one needs to maintain the illusion that everything is going to be okay when swamped with projects.
So here are five romantic comedies to watch (or avoid).
Pretty Woman (1990)
Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) is a business man who hires a hooker (Julia Roberts) to accompany him at social functions, while he woos an aging shipbuilder into selling his company.
It’s a Cinderella story, repackaged with thigh-high boots and a massive credit card chip on Prince Charming’s shoulder, because Los Angeles is a cold and unforgiving land. Richard Gere was born to wear a suit and act like a dick (eat your heart out, Christian Gray!), but Julia Roberts is absolutely luminescent as the world-weary streetwalker.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012)
A gaggle of British retirees (Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Celie Imrie, and Ronald Pickup) embark on a trip to India to stretch their retirement pound further. But despite the proprietor’s (Dev Patel) efforts, the “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is nothing like it looks on the brochure.
How could one go wrong with this septet of actors? The story is a light-hearted journey of personal discovery and character building and finding love in unexpected times. There are opportunities for all the actors to flex their well-honed dramatic chops, whether hobnobbing with street vendors, playing cricket on the street, or simply moaning about the local food.
Warm Bodies (2013)
“R” (Nicholas Hoult) is a zombie who lacks a pulse, craves the taste of brains, and communicates through grunts. Despite these obstacles he falls in love with the human Julie (Teresa Palmer) – but only after eating her boyfriend.
The solution to the zombie plague is totally predictable. Doesn’t really matter, though. It’s unbelievably cute to see how a zombified pretty-boy hipster residing inside a deserted airport spends his days, and woos women by playing LPs in the body of a crashed airplane.
If you’re not yet bored of the zombie trend, you should watch Warm Bodies. And if you are all zombied-out, watch it anyways, because since “R” only communicates in shrugs and groans, you hardly ever have to sit through silly declarations of romance.
My Sassy Girl (2001)
Korean. Gyeon Woo (Cha Tae-Hyun) is a college student who falls in love with a sassy girl (Jun Ji-Hyun) on a train. She has some issues.
So this is the second-highest grossing Korean movie of all time. Maybe it is as good as its box office receipts make it out to be. But I couldn’t look past the titular Sassy Girl’s irrational bouts of violence. She punches Gyeon Woo hard enough to bloody his nose, and regularly threatens him with death (“Wanna die?”) but the audience is supposed to laugh at this! If Richard Gere punched Julia Roberts in the face in Pretty Woman that just would not fly. I don’t care that Sassy Girl has a dark and tragic history and that the movie has some mystic themes about love, time travel, and destiny! Gyeon Woo only puts up with this because it’s his first relationship and he has no idea what a healthy one is supposed to look like, and because he’s a bit of a foreveralone subject by parental pressure to get hitched and produce babies. Ugh. All in all, a travesty.
My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
Julianne Potter (Julia Roberts) is in love with her best friend, Michael (Dermot Mulroney), so she tries to sabotage his wedding.
For every happy couple, there’s usually somebody who didn’t get what they want. One rather empathizes with Julianne and cheers on her attempts to sabotage that slattern, Kimmy, (Cameron Diaz) her best friend’s about to marry. But, oh, it’s not that simple. Julianne is not the hero. Kimmy is not a scarlet woman. Perhaps Michael and Kimmy were meant for each other. Or perhaps not?
The cleverness of My Best Friend’s Wedding is that it’s all fun and hijinks until you realize that, no, it’s not. Not everybody gets a happy ending, but one has to be OK with it somehow. This is a brave movie, and I don’t enjoy watching it, but I love it all the same.
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