Here's Hoping!

It occurs to me that my last post could be viewed as negative and disappointed.

Best to counter that by saying that, yes, I am generally disappointed and annoyed with the romantic comedy milieu, but I'm not giving up.  Some of why these movies don't exist undoubtedly has to do with very mundane cock blocks like studios won't buy scripts that don't strictly adhere to some chauvinistic, patronizing idea of what women like, so not very many people even attempt to write higher-quality scripts, so very, very few get made, so I end up feeling negative and disappointed.

But these movies should exist.  For one thing, there are a lot of women out there who are sick of going to see some half-assed girl movie they were really, really hoping would live up to the potential of their trailer.  In terms of sheer numbers, there are quite a lot of us.  Sure, data shows that teenage boys go see the most movies, but isn't that a vicious cycle?  They're the ones going, so they're the ones who get oodles of quality movies made for them, so they all go, so the movies make tons of money, so...  Studios have gotten savvy in some ways, capitalizing on movie adaptations of wildly lucrative books with massive, mostly female audiences, like Twilight and The Hunger Games.  

For every Twilight, there are dozens of better written, more fully realized, more widely appealing romances, and I love a lot of them and acknowledge that a lot of others appeal to other sorts of women at other points in their lives.  The most successful romance novels, the most touching and memorable, in my opinion are ones that involve more than just romance; they're also about friendship, starting a new career, letting go of the past, or acknowledging or realizing or pursuing a dream or goal, and the funnier and the sexier, the better, too.  Come on, out of those dozens, one (at least) would make a delightful, low budget smash hit.  I love big-budget, high-tech, explosion-heavy action flicks as much as the next dude, but all the explosions I need in my romances take place in beds.  Um, or cars or showers or picnic blankets or...

Sorry, momentarily distracted myself there.  What I'm driving at is, if lots of romance novels can do this, movies can, too.  More importantly, movies can do it because romances (funny or melodramatic or tense) happen in real life. All around me, my friends and family (and billions of strangers, of course) are living their own romances.  They're at all stages of romance: the first few dates, discussing what it would mean to live together, trying to make it work long-distance, getting married, making babies, and even the hard heartbreaks and breakups that hopefully will form the background for a lasting future romance.  They're cute, frustrating, confusing, exhilarating and surprising, and any one of them would make a great romantic comedy.  Okay, there would have to be editing, montages, probably some rewrites of fumbled monologues and jokes that didn't quite work, but the raw material is there.

And, more prosaically, television is already doing this with great success.  Romance and comedy are mixed with career problems, family issues, complicated backgrounds, hilarity, melodrama and so much more in shows as varied as The Newsroom, Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Rizzoli & Isles, Saving Grace, 30 Rock, Castle, Damages, Californication, In Treatment, Mad Men, New Girl, Parenthood, Revenge, Political Animals, Mildred Pierce, Downton Abbey, and Homeland.

All of this is to say, here's hoping!