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There is no movie genre more maligned than the romantic comedy. If you don’t believe me, tell someone that you just can’t get enough of rom-coms the next time you are asked about your favorite movies and watch a blend of incomprehension and disgust cross the other person’s face. Harsh? Maybe, but according to an Op-Ed in* The New York Times *by Maureen Dowd, there’s a very good reason for it: romantic comedies are dead, and Hollywood killed them. In a conversation with film writer Sam Wasson, the two take a moment to mourn the shift in the romantic comedy landscape that has gone from the golden age of the '30s and '40s to He’s Just Not That Into You](He's Just Not That Into You (2009) - Movie | Moviefone).
But maybe the problem is that in the ‘good old days’ of the '30s and '40s, there wasn’t really a rom-com genre … technically. The great directors mentioned in Dowd’s piece – Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch – were two directors known for directing *comedies – *screwball comedies to be exact. Their movies may have had a romantic streak a mile wide, but they were more than that. These movies were witty, smart, and you could enjoy them without being all ‘hearts and flowers’ about it. Modern day rom-coms bear little resemblance to their ancestors – they aren’t smart, they aren’t witty, and they certainly aren’t very romantic and it seemed like the moment we put the ‘Rom’ into the rom-com, the films were pushed into the girlie ghetto and stayed there ever since.Filed under: Comedy, Romance, Fandom, Newsstand
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