The Current State Of Romantic Comedies: 'You People,' 'Shotgun Wedding'
#211: "You People," "Shotgun Wedding," "Out of Sight," "Along Came Polly"
Edition 211:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: It’s all about romantic comedies! What’s the state of the genre on each of the most popular streaming services? We’ll discuss, before dipping back into the rom-com hayday for a couple of streaming suggestions for you. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” my guy has a new movie out. Literally. Guy Ritchie writes and directs, Jake Gyllenhaal stars, and I watch.
You People
Hollywood can’t quite kill romantic comedies, but it can’t quite bring them back to life either. This week we got star-studded entires on both Netflix and Amazon right before Valentine’s Day, prime (no pun intended) examples of the way the genre is crawling along right now in a zombified state, banished to the outer edges of streaming services and restrained by the same old tropes that made it a reliable box office draw some 20 years ago.
The noisier of the two is You People, written by and starring Jonah Hill alongside writer/director Kenya Barris, better known as the showrunner of “Blackish.” Mixed race is certainly on the mind here, as Hill’s Jewish protagonist falls in love with a black, Muslim woman and watches as the two sets of parents — Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny on one side, Eddie Murphy and Nia Long on the other — all-but rip each other apart.
In movie terms, it’s Meet The Parents mixed with Look Who’s Coming To Dinner. In practical terms, it’s tap-dancing on a landmine of racial and cultural boobytraps, treading so lightly as to ensure none of it could ever be that funny.
Perhaps it would’ve been funnier if Barris and Hill didn’t write their funniest cast member (Murphy) as a character who never smiles, let alone cracks jokes. Seeing him on screen as nothing but a straight man is like having Michael Jordan on your team and then only playing tennis.
Netflix of course specializes in making movies that have the outline of a particular thing — a funny comedy, an action-packed thriller, an epic drama — without ever coloring it in. None of the characters in this movie are three-dimensional humans, and none ever develop beyond the stereotypical archetypes we assume for them from the beginning. Establishing shots around Los Angeles and important monuments forced into the background of scenes are carrying a heavy load to make the viewer feel like the story is happening in a real place. And yet you throw it on your screen and are treated to a perfectly enjoyable semblance of comedy. The same enjoyable, replaceable, forgettable type of rom-com that has come to dominate the landscape.
I’ll still take a couple of these every year over the dozen or so rom-coms the streamer puts out every Christmas. Netflix has officially taken Hallmark’s corner, which I guess was the plan, but the content ranges from “not that bad” to “the one with Lindsay Lohan.”
The difficulty with making romantic comedies is the long list of tropes that must be hit, which makes taking risks with the form almost impossible. For every one 500 Days of Summer there’s a million You People’s. Even the best rom-coms of the last handful of years, like The Big Sick or Set It Up, are basically just reworking what was successful in the past with slightly different set-ups, settings, and actors.
That’s why I always said that the success of a rom-com lives and dies by the chemistry of its romantic leads. It’s what makes those examples above special. And it’s what I’ll commend Amazon for at least trying.
I Want You Back made an interesting pairing between Charlie Day and Jenny Slate. Something From Tiffany’s brought Zoey Deutch back to the genre (albeit with unforgivable black hair) beside charming newcomer Kendrick Sampson. Late Night is a friendship rom-com between Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson. The Voyeurs was early to the Sydney Sweeney bandwagon. All these movies have a level of done-ness Netflix rarely reaches, and yet, they all fall within the realm of the best possible version of mediocrity (with the exception of Shotgun Wedding, for reasons I outline below).
However, there is one streaming service that gives me hope for the future of romantic comedies.
Hulu is the only service taking risks and trying creative things to push the genre forward instead of simply recycling the past. Happiest Season turned the holiday rom-com on its head. Palm Springs was one of the best movies of 2020 full stop. Fresh tried a premise that had literally never been done before. I never saw Good Luck to You, Leo Grande but I can assure you the ledger of movies about the sex lives of women aged 60+ is pretty much empty. Even Rosaline found a new wrinkle in one of the most familiar love stories ever told. And of course, all of those movies had great romantic lead pairings too.
My overarching point here is that we haven’t run out of ideas. Every possible rom-com premise has not been exhausted, despite that common refrain. It’s simply that originality has been de-prioritized, a sentiment that echoes across all of Hollywood but can most acutely be felt when we open up our hearts to another meet cute that goes nowhere.
This Valentine’s Day, love can most reliably be found on Hulu.
Something New
Shotgun Wedding (Amazon Prime): One can quite easily see the appeal of this movie, and its lead part, to the originally-cast Ryan Reynolds. It’s the same wise-cracking, famous-people-on-an-island thing that was obvious in Ticket To Paradise, except here, the fact that it’s a slightly cheaper production becomes the entire premise of the movie. Josh Duhamel, the knock-off Reynolds replacement, is set to marry Jennifer Lopez on a tropical yet sketchy island in the south Pacific when, CURVEBALL, pirates show up and take everyone hostage.
The sheer ridiculousness of the premise, and the presence of Jennifer Coolidge as a mother-in-law, would lead you to believe the movie could be campy fun. But it’s tanked by what I don’t mind saying is legitimately bad acting from the leads, especially Lopez, who comes off looking like someone who thinks she’s being really funny yet doesn’t realize she’s not as in on the joke as she hopes. In some ways I respect the movie for playing it straight and trying to extract sincerity out of what is a pretty dumb plot, it just didn’t come together into anything worth checking out. For me it’s gotta be a hard pass.
Something Old
Out of Sight (1998, Peacock): I do want to redeem Jennifer Lopez, who was an iconic if not always successful rom-com leading lady in the early 2000s (Maid in Manhattan, The Wedding Planner, Shall We Dance). All of those come as a direct result of this late 90s barn-burner from Steven Soderbergh, an absolute hard 10 masterpiece in which Lopez is legitimately sizzling alongside George Clooney as FBI-bank robber cat-and-mouse lovers. We want to talk about chemistry? This is as good as it gets. Soderbergh’s filmmaking elevates the movie maybe even beyond comparison to the rest of the genre. Perhaps it can’t even be considered, but that doesn’t stop it from being the peak of popcorn entertainment and a must-see for all rom-com fans.
Something to Stream
Along Came Polly (Netflix): This movie breaks my rom-com cardinal rule, and that’s why I mention it, because the very best parts have nothing to do with the central romantic pairing. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is a comedic supernova in the best friend role, and his outrageous basketball scenes were my only exposure to this well-known genre entry until I sat down to watch it recently. The other scene-stealer is Alec Baldwin as the “grumpy boss,” another classic rom-com trope, whose deadpan comedy here had me howling. Their two contributions tilt the movie’s axis to such a degree that the climax of the movie literally subs out the lead in order to finally put Hoffman and Baldwin in a room together. It does not disappoint.
That’s pretty high praise when the stars of your movie are Ben Stiller and Jennifer Anniston, who fill in the typical uptight planner meets wild child storyline with their usual charm. The writer/director here, John Hamburg, also wrote the Meet The Parents series, the Zoolander movies and I Love You Man. So the movie is complete with the kind of early 2000s professionalism and polish that’s simply gone from rom-coms today. Put the whole package together, and I definitely recommend to any lovebirds out there this month.
Trailer Watch: The Covenant
There may be no bigger apologist than me when it comes to Guy Ritchie, a wildly inconsistent filmmaker who does one genre (cockney gangster movies) better than anyone on the planet, and yet cannot resist the siren call of more mainstream projects (King Arthur, Aladdin).
His new movie isn’t quite a blockbuster, despite a starring role for Jake Gyllenhaal, but it definitely leans closer to the second camp than the first. This trailer shows no quippy dialogue, no creative cussing, no sass, and certainly no cockney accents. Instead it’s a straight ahead war thriller, and to be honest it looks less like Black Hawk Down and more like a B-movie. Someone get this man on a plane back to east London.