Silly Love Films

There are some who have accused me of being a cynic and asking what's wrong with romantic comedies. To which I would answer, absolutely nothing: the romance of the movies may be what it's all about and should you offer me Bringing Up Baby (1939), The Shop Around The Corner (1940), Before Sunrise (1994) or The Clock (1945), there would not only be no problems, but rather a state of bliss.

What I object to is much of what would once have been called the 'woman's picture'. The genre has developed a soft centre and the likes of Love Actually (2003) and 27 Dresses (2008) is a far more common of what we're likely to see. The (once brilliant) writer and director Richard Curtis has mispresented the debate with this often repeated quote:

'If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.'

The critic Anthony Lane - who was absolutely ripped to shreds for daring to criticise Sex In The City and Mama Mia - had it right in his review of the remake of The Women when he made this comment:

'I am aware of the dire paucity of films that appeal to a grownup female audience, as opposed to a mob of ten-year-old Transformers fans, but why should discerning viewers of either gender be fobbed off with indolence? Taken together, Sex and the City, Mamma Mia!, and The Women add up to a spectacular trilogy of the inane, and to point that out is not the prerogative of the misogynist or the killjoy. It’s the view of someone who thinks that women deserve better from the movies, and who sees no joys to kill.'

The way that Hollywood has rediscovered the female audience is fascinating, whether they are serving that audience is another matter.