Gone are the days when Tom wooed Meg, when Richard defended Julia’s honour and Ethan pined broodingly for Winona. Almost gone are the days when boy meets girl and it’s classy and romantic and schmaltzy.
The norm nowadays is filled with dirty sex and even dirtier jokes and language, created for a younger audience.
It’s almost as if American Pie launched a new genre in American film targeted at teens and college kids: raunchy romance.
Although there are still movies such as Made of Honour, 27 Dresses and P.S I Love You, more and more romantic movies are becoming decidedly perverse. Take the two Dane Cook films: Good Luck Chuck and My Best Friend’s Girl.
The former is a story about Charlie Logan.
He has to break a sexual curse. A woman sleeps with him once and the next man she meets will be her soul mate, this, of course, makes him extremely popular with the ladies and once news spreads, he begins upon a voyage of sexual pleasure, until he meets the girl of his dreams.
The latter is somewhat cruder.
Meet Tank Turner. He gets paid by jilted men to take women on the worst possible dates of their lives in order to make them realize how awesome their former boyfriends are. His tactics include playing derogatory hip hop loudly in the car, getting completely wasted and taking them to strip clubs. He then faces a monumental dilemma when he falls head over heels for his best friend’s crush when said best friend hires Tank to take her on a lousy date because she is losing interest in him.
And the latest; Zack and Miri make a Porno. This is my favourite one. The characters, especially Miri played by Elizabeth Banks, seem so natural, and believable. It’s not just silly things happening to silly people that you know would never happen in the real world.
The story goes something like this: Zack and Miri are friends. Strictly platonic, no deeper feelings harboured by either of them. They both have serious money problems and less than serious jobs, so, after a hilarious scene involving “granny panties”, in order to combat their massive debt, they decide to make a porn movie together. As the porno filming gets under way, the duo start to see they have more feelings for each other than they originally thought. And you can just about guess the rest.
And it has to be said: I enjoyed all three of the above films... I laughed in all the right places or; wrong places as the case may be and I was shocked / horrified when I was supposed to be.
After watching When Harry Met Sally, a classic from the late 80’s, it just seems to me, as the years go by, what was considered truly outrageous a few years ago is what we are all so used to now.
The question is: is it a good or bad thing, or is it just a progression?
I wonder what romance will look like 10, even 5 years from now.
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