Ranting About Romance

After ranting about good guys, I got my fix over the weekend by watching Hallmark movies. Yeah, they're sappy and obviously done on the cheap, but they don't seem to be making romantic comedies for the big screen these days, so this is the only way to get my fix. Bonus: the characters are usually adults. The heroes are men, not overgrown manchild fratboys, as we've been seeing too much of in the few "romantic" comedies that have been made recently. That means the heroines can be adults without being depicted as humorless shrews who are forcing these men to grow up. Also, the heroes are almost always the "good guys," rather than jerks who need to be healed with love. The jerks are usually "Mr. Wrong," while the nice guy prevails in the end.

Ironically, this seems to be where the actors who play the good guys on science fiction shows tend to end up (probably because of the Canada filming connection). In fact, the actor who played the character I was ranting about Friday showed up as the leading man recently in one of these movies.

However, these movies don't entirely scratch the romantic comedy itch because they kind of fail in the romance part. It's sort of there, but for the most part, they forget to write the actual relationship. I don't think it's just because of how chaste these movies tend to be because you can write the romance and relationship even without the physical stuff being front and center (just look at how juicy some of the movies made during the height of the strict production code could be). There's just something missing.

In two recent movies I watched, part of the problem is that the focus for the heroine is generally on something else. That's fine if you're making a movie about finding yourself, building a career, or female empowerment. It just doesn't work when you tack on an ending in which she resolves a romantic relationship that wasn't really there. It's even weirder when the story given to the man is the romance, and he's shown as being really into the woman while she's missing all the signals. She's treating him the way I treat a man I'm not interested in when he's trying to make moves and I don't want to have to outright reject him -- right up to the happy ending when suddenly they're kissing. The standard romantic plot seems to go like:

Meet cute! Sparks seem to fly!
HERO: Wow, you're like a breath of fresh air. I find you fascinating.
HEROINE: I'm really concerned about my career. This could be my big break, and I need to make it work.
Cue lots of scenes of them together, showing obvious connections, like them having the same dreams for their lives.
HERO: You're the most amazing person I've ever met. We should pursue our dreams together.
HEROINE: Oops, gotta go. I've got this big career thing I need to take care of. I'm really busy right now.
Career-related crisis ensues, heroine gets her act together and prevails.
HEROINE: Hey, let's get together and pursue our dreams! (Throws her arms around him and kisses him. There may be an epilogue showing their wedding.)

It's like there's no emotion whatsoever on her part until the end. She's not interested but torn. She's not agonizing over having to choose love or her career. She's happily pursuing her career and oblivious about the guy until she abruptly is all over the guy. It's like "Friendzone, friendzone, friendzone, LOVE!" (And, really, that's not helping by sending the signal that when we're constantly talking about being too busy or focused on other things to get together, we're eventually going to come around. Though I guess the odds are slim that the men who don't get the message in real life are watching Hallmark movies.) We don't even see the moment of realization that she does love him, after all, no fear of losing him. I don't necessarily want to see the RomCom Dash -- that last-second frantic chase across town to reach him before he sails away forever -- in every movie, but it does help if we get some sense of "hey, the right guy was with me all along, and I might lose him if I don't do something about it" rather than the abrupt switch. There's got to be a happy medium in there somewhere.

I wrote that one script for a TV Christmas movie, but I'm currently attempting to turn it into a novella or short novel because I've realized in watching more of these films that my script probably wouldn't make it. I wrote it more for the Lifetime or ABC Family model, since it had a fantasy element to it, but now Hallmark has taken over the Christmas movie thing, and they don't seem to do much of the fantasy element (aside from the "Santa is real!" stories) and they don't want much in the way of romance, even while doing a romance. With most of these movies, Christmas or otherwise, it would be so easy to fix them without changing the budget, which suggests that they're getting just what they want.

Really, what I want is a good screenwriter/filmmaker to be able to make a good big-screen romantic comedy in which the characters get to be adults. We need something along the lines of a When Harry Met Sally, and it's been a long time since anything on that level was made.

Vicarious Summer

We had a relatively cool (for Texas in July) weekend, which meant we got to take advantage of a local amenity. The next town over from me does fireworks at the lake on Friday nights during the summer. It's sponsored by a lakeside resort that has viewing parties at its bar, but you can see the fireworks even better from the lakeside city parks. Friday night was the perfect weather for sitting out by the lake, watching the boats until it got dark and then watching the fireworks. The show's a little shorter and less elaborate than July 4, but it's fireworks without the huge crowds you get on July 4.

And that made me realize why I get a particular craving for British (and it must be British) chick lit during the summers. I like vicariously enjoying a summer where summer is the outdoor time of year, when you can do fun things like go to the lake, go hiking, have picnics, tour the country on canal boats, go to fairs and festivals, have garden parties, etc., because you can step outdoors during daylight without bursting into flames. Here, that's all stuff you do in October and November, or maybe March and April, but not too late in April. And yet we bravely try to have the traditional summer. They do the Shakespeare festival on summer nights, never mind that it's still 90 degrees at the beginning of the show. There are outdoor festivals in July, when typically it's about 101 in the afternoon. For the "Taste Dallas" festival in July, I don't think they even have to turn on a stove to cook the food.

And so, I like reading books about people having a "normal" summer. Actually, this July hasn't been too bad, but the normal weather for this time of year (100+ degree days) is coming back later this week.

My only HBO movie of the weekend was Moonrise Kingdom, which took a premise that could easily have been dark and gritty -- two disaffected outsider tweens run away together -- and made it fun and quirky. Part of that was that it was set in 1965, so it was a simpler, more innocent time, and part was that it was set on a coastal island away from any of the grittier elements of civilization, so you never got the feeling the kids were in any danger from the usual problems that affect runaway kids. The boy was a hyper-prepared scout, so they had elaborate campsites. The whole feel of the movie reminded me, oddly, of Pushing Daisies.

I'd seen this movie referenced in discussions about why Hollywood can't make decent romantic comedies anymore, with this being proof that there were good ones out there. But this didn't at all trigger any of my romantic comedy responses or scratch my romantic comedy itches. The kids thought they were having a romance, but to me it looked more like two outsiders finding each other as friends and thinking that because they were a boy and a girl they had to make it romantic, but their "romantic" moments were rather half-hearted. I saw it more as a pre-teen fantasy about freedom, independence, connection and finding a place to belong. It was a good movie in that respect, but I can't see it as any kind of proof that there are good romantic comedies being made.

I have high hopes for Austenland, which should be coming soon, and I hope it comes here (and preferably to a theater I don't have to take a train to get to). The book was cute, I like the casting for the film, and it's just different enough that maybe they can have fun with it without falling into all the usual Hollywood cliches (and, please, let nobody have to chase anyone through an airport).

Now I'm off to have a Get Things Done Day, Leaving the House edition. I need new batteries in every watch I own, there are some things I need to get at the Home Depot, and I need to take care of some things at the bank and post office.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls and Good Men

I don't think I'll be getting that new door installed today because it's supposed to be raining off and on all day, and it sort of defeats the purpose of weatherproofing an enclosure to remove the temporary closure while it's raining. At least, that's my logic. They may or may not agree with me. I'm loving the rain, though. The temperatures are in the 70s in mid-July. Between that and all the back-to-school ads in the newspaper yesterday, I'm afraid my body is trying to tick over to "fall" mode and will be terribly disappointed when summer inevitably returns for another couple of months. I'm anticipating getting a lot of writing done today because this is Good Writing Weather.

During yesterday's rain, I found myself re-watching Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day because it was on HBO, and I can't seem to resist that movie (yes, I have it on DVD, but watching on HBO is even easier). It's also a good rainy day movie. Seeing this movie this weekend after last weekend's Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie got me started thinking. What's the female equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

In case you aren't familiar with the term, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a character most often seen in a male-focused romantic comedy, romance or coming-of-age story. She's an adorable (or adorkable) woman/child (a childlike free spirit with a woman's body and sex drive) with a collection of quirks instead of a real characterization who guides the hero on his emotional journey. Zooey Deschanel is generally considered to be the poster girl for this character type (particularly in 500 Days of Summer), though I believe the term was coined for the Kirstin Dunst character in Elizabethtown. Another frequently cited example is Natalie Portman's character in Garden State. In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, she's got a weird combination of hypersomnia and insomnia, so she has trouble getting to sleep but once she's asleep she can sleep through absolutely anything. She's in her twenties but loves vinyl records, and when it looks like her building could burn down (and the world's ending in about a week anyway), she grabs her collection of albums instead of her purse with her ID and money. She's so ditzy that she managed to miss the last plane that would take her to see her family before the world ended, and she never got around to delivering her neighbor's mail that was mistakenly put into his box, so he never got the letter from his old girlfriend that could have changed his life. But she's also so winsomely charming that she can get whatever help they need on their pre-apocalyptic road trip, and being with her solves all the hero's emotional problems.

I'm not sure when this character type first appeared, and I wonder if it's a misread of some classic characters. The Katharine Hepburn characters in Holiday and Bringing Up Baby fit some of the characteristics, but I'd say they're Fake Manic Pixie Dream Girls in that in both cases she's deliberately putting on the extreme quirkiness, perhaps out of an awareness that this is a male fantasy, while having a distinct agenda (a Manic Pixie Dream Girl usually doesn't have a real agenda of her own -- she may state a goal, but she'll always sacrifice that goal for the hero). Holly Golightly in the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany's looks like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she has her own character arc. She may resolve the hero's problems, but then she has even bigger problems that he then has to help her deal with. It's that actual character arc that's usually missing from the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who only exists as an accessory to a man's life.

There doesn't seem to be a Manic Pixie Dream Guy, unless you count those Frat Pack type romantic comedies in which the hero is an overgrown manchild, but that doesn't strike me as a female fantasy. That's more male fantasy/fear -- she has to loosen up a bit, but she's still in the role of mean mommy making him grow up. I think the female equivalent is the Good Man. In most of the movies I can think of that are centered on the woman's journey, it comes down to her having to learn what a Good Man really is. There's the guy who's Good On Paper, who seems to be just what she wants, but then she's thrown up against a true Good Man who may not fit her checklist, but who proves himself to be honest, loving and loyal. You see that in classic screwball comedies and in a lot of the current ones. There's Katherine Hepburn having to choose among her ex-husband (whom she may have misjudged), a passionate reporter and the seemingly solid businessman in The Philadelphia Story, only to learn that her ex is the man who will stand by her in spite of -- or even because of -- her human frailties. In Miss Pettigrew, there's the wealthy man who can keep her in luxury, the connected man who can make her a star, and the penniless but talented and honest man who loves her for herself. Even going more modern (since Miss Pettigrew was based on a book written in the screwball era), there's While You Were Sleeping, in which the heroine has to choose between the slick, handsome Prince Charming type and his hardworking, less glamorous brother. Or more recently, Leap Year, in which she has to choose between a superficial doctor and a hardworking Irish pub owner. Notting Hill was also on TV yesterday, and although it does seem more of a male-focused movie, it's clearly aimed at a female audience, so it's about a Good Man who has to prove to the heroine that he's a Good Man once she realizes that a Good Man is what she needs.

But while I think the Good Man is a strong female fantasy, the interesting thing is that in the screwball era, during the Depression, it was also playing into a male fantasy. The ordinary working man managed to win the heart of even a spoiled heiress because of his inner good qualities that made him a better man than a playboy or a social climber. And to add to the fantasy, usually the tycoon father also approved of him as a good man and often gave him an opportunity (never money, though -- the Good Man always rejects handouts, but he'll take a job he's proven himself worthy of). And maybe that's why the trope has stood the test of time. It plays into everyone's fantasies. Yeah, it's a high standard for manhood, but being honest, loving and loyal is probably more achievable for the average guy than being fabulously wealthy and powerful. On the other hand, it seems that women generally find the Manic Pixie Dream Girl irritating. Why go to a movie to watch a crazy chick mess with a guy's head when you can watch that so often in real life?

Romantic Comedy and Fairy Tales

We dodged a bullet with yesterday's storms. According to the local TV weather geek (actually, his detailed Facebook posts, since he wasn't on the air yesterday), the rain-cooled air from the approaching storm rushed out just far enough ahead to keep the warm, humid air that was already in place from fueling the storm, so we ended up just getting rain and wind, with no hail or tornadoes. It was such an atmospherically blustery day that I started re-reading Wuthering Heights.

Then I went back to the New Project, which is really more of an experiment. I still don't know what it will end up being, a short story, a novella or even a novel. I suspect, given my patterns, that it'll either end up being a full novel, or I'll get to a certain point where it's on the verge of being too long to be "short" fiction and then I'll suddenly wrap it up quickly. It started as a fairy tale rewrite -- fleshing out the traditional story -- but turned into a fairy tale twist of looking at what was going on behind the scenes with the other people who were present when that story was taking place, and that turned into a sort of revisionist thing of the way those other people would have really reacted to those events (like, take the Cinderella story -- when a mystery woman no one has ever seen before shows up as a prospective bride for the heir to the throne and instantly has him wrapped around her little finger, wouldn't someone get a wee bit suspicious of her maybe being a foreign spy infiltrating herself into the court or an enchantress getting him under her thrall?). And then it turned into all of the above: a fleshed-out fairy tale in which the characters are given some dimension, but then also a behind-the-scenes story in which the traditional characters aren't the main characters and the well-known story is playing in the background, and a revision in which the main characters are dealing in a reasonably realistic way with the fairy tale events. It's loads of fun to play with, but I'm not sure what the result will look like or if it will fall apart halfway through.

As for the book already written and published, here's a little background on the genesis of Kiss and Spell. I'll keep this vague enough to avoid spoilers since the book is still trickling out and I don't think everyone's read it yet (insert usual plea to post, tweet, skywrite, blog, write reviews, etc. about it to help spread the word because I don't want anyone to miss it). I thought I'd wrapped up the series with Much Ado About Magic. Obviously, I left some major loose ends dangling, and I wanted to do something with that potential story line, but I didn't know for sure what, and I didn't think I'd get the chance. I only wrote Much Ado because the Japanese publisher thought it was already written and offered to publish it, not realizing that I'd only written a proposal. But then the Japanese publisher asked if I wanted to write more books. At the time, I didn't have any solid ideas. I'd already defeated the main villains. I said I'd have to think about it.

The same day I met with my agent and discussed this possibility, I attended a convention panel (I saw my agent because I was in Denver for a convention) in which several authors, including Katherine Kurtz (OMG!!!!) and Carrie Vaughn, discussed writing series. Carrie Vaughn said that the way she kept her series interesting for herself was by essentially writing a different kind of book for each book in the series. One might be a mystery, another a romantic comedy, another a caper. The readers might not necessarily notice this because the books were in her usual style, with her usual characters, dealing with the established situations in the series, but it was the way she approached the writing, so that even though she was dealing with the same stuff, to her she was doing something totally new. That clicked for me, and I found myself mentally scrolling through my literary bucket list of the kinds of books I've wanted to write, and I came up with the quest story.

But another thing I've always wanted to write was a straight romantic comedy. I loved the chick lit genre because it seemed to me to be closer to romantic comedy films than romance novels were, but I never managed to sell a straightforward (non-fantasy) chick lit novel before the market tanked, and there isn't much of a market for the kind of romantic comedy I would write. Was there a way to do that in this series? I've also always wanted to write some kind of resistance movement story, and I was researching that sort of thing for another idea I have spinning around in the back of my head. It all came together to create the rather crazy plot for this book.

The more I thought about romantic comedies, the more I realized that they are, in their own way, fairy tales. They even have their patterns and motifs. Mr./Miss Wrong, the reveal of the Big Deception/Lie, and the Mad Dash Across Town are as common in romantic comedy as getting magical help due to kindness and the reveal of the true identity are in fairy tales. Each genre also has its typical stock characters you expect to show up. Since this series was essentially about inserting magical elements into a romantic comedy world, why couldn't I flip that and insert romantic comedy elements into a (literal) fantasy world? I thought I had something different planned for the aftermath of what happened to Katie at the end of No Quest, but that ended up being the set-up that was necessary for this to happen. It also gave me a chance to revisit the romantic relationship. That mostly happened in the background of all the saving the world stuff, and it happened maybe more quickly than I'd originally imagined, since I didn't know how many books I'd get to write. This situation gave me the chance to go back to the beginning and focus on it for a while. I also love the idea that if two people are really suited for each other, they'll be suited for each other no matter what the circumstances are. All they have to do is find each other again, and then the same things they always loved about each other will still be there.

It was fun throwing my characters into a When Harry Met Sally/You've Got Mail world, and even more fun once they came to realize that's what was happening. Genre awareness is used all the time in horror and science fiction, where the characters have seen enough movies to at least try to cope with the situation on that basis (the whole Scream franchise), but I don't think I've seen too many cases of a character coping with a situation because she knows what always happens in a romantic comedy.

Romantic Comedy Tropes

I'm feeling slightly off-kilter today, probably because I had a disorienting night. I fell asleep quickly and slept deeply, then woke up thinking it was morning and I'd slept all night. It wasn't a well-rested and ready to hop out of bed feeling, though, more like a "please don't make me get up yet" feeling. I finally forced myself to peel an eye open and look at the clock, only to find that it was just a couple of hours after I went to sleep. Then it happened again later in the night. I had a hard time convincing myself that it really was morning when I finally woke up in the morning. Maybe I'm dreaming now. But I'd better pull myself together because today is a business-type day when I have to actually interact with other people in a professional manner.

I spent yesterday afternoon doing a kind of brainstorming retreat on the next book. One thing I like to do when starting a book is watch movies or TV shows that remind me in some way of the story -- similar setting, similar storyline, similar mood or theme, characters that remind me of mine, etc. This isn't really to steal or copy ideas but to spur my thinking. I think of it as kind of like looking at a map when planning a route. You may already know how to get where you're going, but when you look at a map, you can see other possibilities. I may play mental games like putting my characters in the story I'm watching and figuring out what they'd do and how they'd react, or I may try putting the characters from the thing I'm watching into my situation and imagining it. Or sometimes it triggers an association chain, where something I'm watching will make me think of something that reminds me of something that triggers an idea. I came up with a biggie yesterday from a combination of association and "what would my character do here?" that I think amps up my story idea considerably. Those "oooooh!" moments are so exciting.

When I was getting ready to write Kiss and Spell, my retreat took on a different purpose because I was going to be deliberately spoofing the romantic comedy genre for a kind of story-within-a-story that happens as the result of a spell. That meant I watched a lot of movies, looking for tropes. Some of those tropes I wanted to truly skewer as a way of pointing out how silly they are. Some I wanted to pay loving homage to. Some I wanted to play with as how they might feel to the people living them if they were taken literally. For instance, so much plot and character development in the worst of these movies seems to happen in montages -- we see bits of moments as set to a pop song that tells us the couple is falling in love. What would it feel like to have your life pass in a montage?

Some of the cliches are fairly recent. For instance, the infamous RomCom Dash, in which a character realizes he or she is really in love with someone and has to make the mad dash across town to tell them Right Now. Sometimes they at least throw in a reason why it has to be done at that moment, like the person is about to leave the country, though in that case I have to wonder what the person at the airport feels when someone who's been giving him/her the brushoff up to that point suddenly arrives to disrupt all the plans. If someone shows up at the airport to try to stop me from going somewhere when I've already bought a ticket, I'm probably not going to be favorably inclined. I think this trope originated with When Harry Met Sally, when Harry is alone on New Year's Eve and remembers the pledge he made the year before that if he and Sally are alone then, they should spend the time together, and then he races to reach her before midnight. The closest I can think of previously to that is in Breakfast at Tiffany's, where she races to find her cat in time. But since When Harry Met Sally, there's been all sorts of crazy driving, barrier leaping and pleading of aid from strangers in order to reach the True Love in time for the big, dramatic declaration of true feelings.

That's another thing that's become a trope, the public declaration of feelings, often in a way that's humiliating. Jennifer Crusie has said that she thinks this trope may have something to do with the fact that marriage no longer really has the same importance in society as it once had, but the public declaration of feelings works in that way because it's a public commitment in front of the community. I'm not a fan of humiliation humor, so I don't like those cringeworthy moments. That's what ruins Notting Hill for me. I'm okay up until the end, but it bothers me that he's the one who has to make a fool of himself in public when their whole story has been about her, as the person with the power in the relationship because of her fame, denying him in public. It seems like for the arc to work, she should have to be the one to make a public statement acknowledging him as the man she loves when previously she's tried to keep their relationship a secret.

One trope that goes way back is the third wheel -- the Mr./Miss Wrong. Generally, the wrong person is the one who's right for who the hero or heroine is trying or pretending to be but who's totally wrong for his/her true self. And most romantic comedies seem to have some element of a character striving to be something that isn't authentic, something they think they ought to be or ought to want but that isn't true to the inner self. The problem is that this trope is used badly, without understanding the reason for it, so you're left with the hero or heroine looking like an idiot for ever thinking this person could be the right one. Maybe they were under a spell … (Hmmmm….)

The Other Side of the Story

We had an equal number of men and women in ballet class last night, which is really rare for an adult class. However, we didn't get to do any pas de deux, because we'd probably kill the poor guys with flying elbows. At least, I would. Not intentionally, but sometimes I struggle with remembering what to do with my arms while I'm worrying about what to do with my legs and my feet.

Now, back to the ongoing romantic comedy discussion as we lead up to the release of book 7, in which I have some fun with romantic comedy tropes in a wacky fantasy way. While I was curled up on the sofa, watching bad movies during my weekend cold, I thought of yet another reason why some of the more recent romantic comedies are failing. There's a failure to consider both sides of the story.

To me, a romance is more satisfying if both characters have a story arc, if there's stuff both of them have to overcome and work on in order to be together. But even if it's just one character who learns A Valuable Lesson, I still need to know why both of them are in this relationship. The formula for a romantic story, whether comedic or dramatic, is pretty simple: you have to have a reason for them to come together in the first place, a reason why he would want to be with her, a reason why she would want to be with him, and something that keeps them from being fully together until the happy ending. The stronger the thing keeping them apart is -- the more hoops they have to jump through and obstacles they have to overcome -- the stronger their reasons for being together should be. Too many of the bad movies in recent years have focused almost exclusively on one person in the relationship (usually the heroine, because these are seen as women's films), without much thought about what's going on with the other person. He exists as a quest object without much say as to whether he really would want her or why he wants her. I think that comes back to the cynicism in the filmmakers who don't think their audiences will notice or care.

For example, there was the Lifetime movie I was watching over the weekend, a sort of Valentine's Day version of A Christmas Carol, in which a bitchy bridezilla with a very mercenary attitude about relationships gets given a tour of her past, present and future Valentine's Days on the eve of her Valentine's Day wedding to a hunky lawyer. In the past, we see their first date, in which he takes her to a jazz club and starts talking about his love of music and how he really wanted to be a musician -- he plays jazz piano -- but he felt pressured by his parents into becoming a lawyer. She sneers at the idea of being a musician, talking about how musicians are total losers who seldom make any real money and never grow up, then switches the conversation to talking about how successful (and rich) he is as a lawyer and what a great car he drives. Of course, the point of the scene is to show the attitude she needs to change, but all I could think of was wondering why he even asked her out on a second date, let alone asked her to marry him. She wasn't hiding what she was or how she felt, so why on earth did he get involved with someone that obnoxious who didn't want to talk about his greatest passion and made it clear she was mostly interested in his paycheck? What did it say about him that he willingly got into a relationship that he planned to make permanent with someone he had to hide an important part of himself from? (We later learned that when he was "working late" he was playing piano with a jazz band and hiding it from her because he knew she wouldn't approve, and he felt he had to quit the band when he got married.) All I could think was that she must have put out on the first date and been absolutely amazing in bed. He certainly never articulated what he was getting out of the relationship that made it worth giving up something he loved. So, yeah, she learned she had to love him for something other than money, and all that, but why did he want to be with her?

This is similar to another bad romantic comedy trope, the triangle where the Miss Wrong is a raging bitch. The general set-up (and, boy, was this popular in chick lit books) was that the heroine is some mousy (Hollywood version, which means totally cute), sweet, loyal person who's in love with the hero, who doesn't seem to notice her that way, even though he really likes her and enjoys being with her. But he's in a relationship with someone else, who's a very high-maintenance bitch who makes his life miserable and is generally awful to everyone, especially the heroine. Some circumstances contrive for him to have to spend enough time with the heroine to fall in love with her, but there's still the bitch to deal with. Think Working Girl. But I always wonder what it says about him that he'd date someone like that and put up with the way she treats him and other people. If he's realized what she's like and has figured out that's not what he wants, why is he so spineless as to not do something about it? I know why writers fall back on this -- if your heroine is essentially the "other woman," then she looks awful if she's getting in the way of a relationship with a good person, so by making the other person look awful, the heroine looks better. But someone can be a decent human being and still be the wrong match. That's just a lot trickier to write, but if it's done well, it can be even more emotional because someone is choosing between two good things rather than the obvious good vs. bad choice.

And then there's my pet peeve: the misunderstanding plot, in which the heroine sees or learns about something the hero has done -- he's seen with another woman, he does something work-related that she doesn't like -- and immediately breaks up with him without discussing it or even being willing to listen to his side of the story. Then when she learns the truth that he was totally innocent, all is forgiven. But the story doesn't consider whether he's okay. Would he want to be with someone so eager to jump to the worst possible conclusion about him? Would it be wise to be in a relationship with someone whose way of dealing with problems is to just walk away without even talking to him or telling him what's wrong?

No matter how happy the ending seems, if this sort of thing is happening, I find myself thinking, "Yeah, that's not gonna last."

Romantic Obstacles

I survived the kindergarteners again, and they survived me. Wow, were they crazy, and we had a smaller group with the craziest kid out. But they did request Beethoven again, so I'm accomplishing something.

I've been thinking more about that essay about romantic comedy by Christopher Orr in The Atlantic, and I'm not sure that one of his arguments holds up. One of his theories about the decline in romantic comedy films is that there aren't as many obstacles today to people being together -- class matters less, parental approval matters less and even marital status matters less.

The classic screwball comedy of the 1930s was built around class, to some extent, since in most cases the dynamic was flighty heiress "princess" and down-to-earth (and often down-on-his-luck) working man -- it was basically an updating of the woodsman's son winning the princess through wit, skill and kindness fairy tales. But the class difference just created differing perspectives that gave them something to argue about and new things to learn from each other. It wasn't a real obstacle to them getting together once they fell in love, and if it was, then the result was usually some plot contrivance that undid it all (he's really a millionaire in disguise!).

Take It Happened One Night -- the relationship obstacles there aren't about class. The problems are that she's on the way to be with the man she loves and had to run away from her father to do so (that's the part that doesn't work in current times -- parents wouldn't be able to stop an adult woman from marrying) while he's the reporter whose career hinges on him getting the story about her. The fact that she's engaged to another is looming over any attraction he has for her, while things are likely over if she finds out about him reporting on her. But, really, the central theme of the movie is that the increasingly difficult road trip forces two unlikely people to learn about each other enough to fall in love, and that's timeless. The movie was updated in the 80s as The Sure Thing, where it was college students sharing a coast-to-coast ride for the holidays, and it still worked. I think the trick with this story is to not paint it in broad strokes and go overboard with the opposites angle -- you need just enough of a reason why these two people might not have met or might not have extended their acquaintance long enough to get to know each other well enough to realize they're made for each other without them being stuck traveling together.

And now I think I kind of want to write a road trip story.

Class may not be the obstacle to marriage for people who really love each other that it once was, but I think it's still a valid obstacle for discovering another person. You may get reverse snobbery -- the young lawyer who's had to work hard to make it through law school and then had to go through rounds of interviews to get a job is probably going to resent the senior partner's daughter who had her tuition paid for by daddy and who's had a job open for her since birth, and he may not realize there's a lot to like about her as a person until he's forced to spend time with her. That was even kind of the love story plot in the stage musical version of Legally Blonde -- she was the pampered princess who went to Harvard Law to follow her boyfriend, while he was the poor kid with the chip on his shoulder fighting his way up, and they bonded over the fact that she was dismissed by the Harvard legacy types for being fluffy and he was dismissed because of his background, but first he had to see past all the pink and learn to take her seriously.

As for the marital status being less of an obstacle now, just look at the plots of some of the classic comedies:
It Happened One Night -- she's running away to marry someone else
Bringing Up Baby -- she waylays him to keep him around when he's supposed to be on his way to his own wedding
The Philadelphia Story -- takes place among the festivities for her wedding to someone else
My Favorite Wife -- when she was lost at sea, he had her declared legally dead so he could marry someone else, just before she returned to civilization
Christmas in Connecticut -- she's pretending to be married, so he thinks she's a wife and mother, and the judge is standing by ready to make the fake marriage a real thing

Actually, there are very few classic comedies in which someone isn't on the verge of marrying someone else. That seems to be the main reason keeping the couple from being together until someone takes the leap of faith to break up the existing relationship and take a chance on the new person. I suspect the difference today is that back then, that was also a reason why the couple couldn't have sex and I'm not sure in today's Hollywood morality that would be an issue. In the old movies, taking sex off the table meant they had to substitute subtext, witty dialogue and sexual tension. Now, nothing's off the table, which robs the story of a lot of its energy. In the old movies, they also weren't sleeping/living with Mr./Miss Wrong, and that's one of the ick factors for me in today's movies, where someone is living with one person while falling in love with another.

I think the real problem in today's lackluster romantic comedies is the lack of subtlety -- they spend more time building up the reasons they can't be together than the reasons they can, and they forget about finding middle ground. If there's a class difference, it has to be a drastic one, where they're from totally different worlds and have nothing in common. If it's a free spirit vs. stick-in-the mud, then if the woman is the free spirit she's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but if it's the other way around she's the shrieking, humorless harpy and he's the overgrown fratboy manchild.

Look at any of the recent "frat pack" style movies (like Knocked Up) and compare that to The Philadelphia Story -- there she's still uptight, the goddess on a pedestal who can't accept human frailty in others, but Cary Grant is no overgrown frat boy. He's an adult man who had a few problems in the past that he seems to have dealt with but that she can't accept until she realizes that she's not perfect, either.

But that kind of writing is difficult, and I guess it's not high enough concept for today's studio executives to understand, so even if a great script gets written, it might not get produced.

What's Wrong with Romantic Comedies?

The Day of Getting Stuff Done actually ended up working. I just have one remaining nagging to-do item, and then I'll have a weight off my shoulders. And new to-do items. Ugh. One big accomplishment was that I sorted through most of my spiral notebooks. Spiral notebooks are kind of my Swiss Army Knife business tool. Instead of shelling out a lot of money for fancy planners, I have calendar pages I printed from Outlook stuck in a sheet protector and a spiral notebook for planning and to-do lists. I have books for various topics, like marketing efforts and my convention work. I use these books for taking notes on library books. I also use them for collecting information on each book project -- research notes, plot outlines, character information, and anything else I might want to reference for a book. They're portable and they keep information together. I've started using loose-leaf paper for brainstorming because I generally don't need to reference that stuff again and I was filling up too many notebooks with things I didn't need to keep. I also sometimes use a big binder and loose-leaf paper for really complicated projects, like my steampunk book. The trick is that it's hard to find the right notebook when I need it in a pile of notebooks. So, I went through the stack, tossed (or if there was a lot of paper left, ripped out used pages) the notebooks I wouldn't need again -- old to-do lists, thoroughly dead projects -- stuck labels on the front of books I was keeping and put hang-tag labels on the spirals, and then put them in magazine holders based on category -- general research, old books, future books, and old ideas I may return to. I was surprised by the number of books I had on detailed ideas that I don't even remember having. Most of the "dead" book ideas were for chick lit, so unless something in them really sparked a "there's still something here" reaction, they got tossed.

On an unrelated note (unless you count the mention of chick lit), there was an interesting essay in this Sunday's newspaper about the decline of the romantic comedy film genre. One little hint about Book 7 is that a lot of the book is a spoof of romantic comedy films. You may recall that last summer I was talking a lot about romantic comedies, and this is why. I watched a lot of them, both good and bad, as I was making lists of tropes and cliches to use. So, I figured that in the lead-up to the release of this book, it's a good time to focus on romantic comedies, and I looked for the essay online. I found that there were also two more parts, part two and and part three. And then I followed a link to find that Billy Mernit, who wrote my favorite book about writing romantic comedies, had written his own response to the original essay. As a bonus, that led me to his blog, which I must now follow.

To sum up the general argument from the initial essay, he was pointing out that one problem is that the great stars, the equivalent of people like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, aren't making romantic comedies these days, but that may be because the scripts are pretty lousy, so high-powered stars don't want to do them. And the scripts may be lousy because there aren't too many "easy" obstacles to love these days -- class differences aren't much of an issue, parental disapproval doesn't matter, race is less of an obstacle, and even marital status doesn't necessarily stop anyone. Sex is something that can happen at the meet-cute, so even if you can't officially formalize your love, there's nothing to stop you from going at it before you work things out. In the follow-up, he points out that this doesn't mean there are no conflicts left, just that they're a lot more difficult and require a lot more nuance in the writing. Another theory he presents fits with what I've been saying for ages, which is that the moviemakers became too cynical about the genre and the audience -- they thought that these were easy money-makers aimed at an audience that would eat up anything thrown at them, so they just slapped together some contrived conflict, stuck in some pop music montages and called it a day, and then when these movies tanked, they threw up their hands and called the genre dead.

The fact that there are still about a zillion romance novels being published every year shows that there's no shortage of romantic conflicts. True, there's probably very, very little that's never been done before, but a good writer can make it work and feel fresh if the characters are interesting and well-drawn. You're not going to get that in a movie if you're banking on the audience liking the actors rather than relating to the characters or if you're letting a pop song tell us about the characters being in love rather than actually developing a relationship.

Over the next month or so, leading up to the Kiss and Spell release, I'll be doing a series of posts (probably the Wednesdays when I'm not doing writing posts) about the romantic comedy genre, with maybe some teasers about the book thrown in. I'll say up front that my use of romantic comedy in this book is meant to be cliched -- that's the point. But I hope it ends up transcending the cliche because you do care about the characters and their situation. 

The Weary Weekend

I'd planned a big writing marathon on Saturday, but was unaccountably weary, and I've found that when I can't keep my eyes open it generally means my subconscious needs more time. So, I figured it was a sign I needed to rest and catch up on some romantic comedies (which actually counts as research). When I woke up with a cough on Sunday and remembered that I'd been coughing in all my dreams (which likely means I was coughing in my sleep), I figured out why I'd been so tired. A suitable application of allergy medicine and cough syrup and a weekend of rest seems to have done the trick.

I rewatched You've Got Mail, and I think I've finally crystallized my problems with that movie. The concept is cute, the supporting cast is fun, the settings are delightful, but unfortunately the core of it is about two unpleasant people being unpleasant to each other. There were times in this rewatch when I wanted to turn it off or mute the sound. Part of the problem is that it hits two of my pet peeves in romantic comedies: the hero and heroine are living with other people through much of the movie, and the other people are so wrong for them that they only exist to serve as temporary roadblocks -- and worse, they don't really even serve as roadblocks.

Having Mr./Miss Wrong around can serve to show why Mr./Miss Right is right, but it's something that has to be handled very delicately if you don't want to ruin the hero and heroine. Mr. (or Miss, but let's stick to one gender for the moment for simplicity's sake) Wrong is generally the person the heroine thinks she should like, the person who's the right fit for the person she thinks she is or the person she's trying to be. He usually represents unfulfilling safety and security. She wouldn't have a bad life with him, but it's not the life she has the potential to live. He's the right person for the false front she shows the world (and maybe even herself) to protect her inner vulnerabilities. Mr. Right is the person who sees the real person under her exterior, but being with him will require her to take the risk and shed that false front. She must choose between taking the risk to have a truly amazing love and life and staying in her comfort zone but remaining unfulfilled. If Mr. Wrong is just plain wrong, like you can't even imagine why she's with that person, then she looks like an idiot for being with him in the first place. For it to work, you need to at least get a glimpse or two of why she's with Mr. Wrong, some connection even if he's only connecting to the fake part of herself. In this movie, both of them are with other people, and there's hardly any sense of connection with those people. They even seem to see their significant others with a bit of contempt, or forget entirely that they exist. The fact that they exist doesn't even really have any bearing on the plot, since it doesn't slow down the hero and heroine's relationship. They even agree to their first face-to-face meeting, before which he talks about how this is likely a woman he'd want to marry, while they're still living with their significant others.

And then there's the living with issue. On film, living together looks exactly like being married, and that puts things into a different headspace. It makes me feel like it's wrong if the characters are behaving in ways that would be wrong for married people, and I feel like it would take something on the level of what would break up a marriage for them to end it. Meeting someone you like better doesn't do it. If they're growing apart, they should work on it. I'd even like the hero or heroine to be the victim if there's cruelty or infidelity because I want the main characters to be people I can pull for. In this film, when it opens they look like two married couples as they get up in the morning and get ready for work, have breakfast, etc. In fact, the first time I saw this movie, until the subsequent scenes in which there are dialogue cues that they aren't married, I thought they were married, which made it even creepier when they jumped online as soon as their significant others were out the door and then read the flowery, romantic e-mails they sent to each other, and then headed to work with their heads in the clouds and had to be reminded of their significant others by their colleagues. That got the main characters off on the wrong foot with me because they were acting like they were having an affair.

I'm not sure why they even gave them significant others, unless they were trying not to go with the stereotype of meeting on the Internet being something for pathetically lonely singles or if they needed an excuse for them not to meet. The real conflict was between them, anyway, with the chain store vs. independent fight that brought on all that nastiness, and it rather boggles me that once he figured out she was his pen pal, he wooed her by being even nastier to her and denigrating her pen pal. This ended up being a lot like Four Weddings and a Funeral, where I loved the scenes of the main characters and their friends but wanted to fast forward past the scenes of the hero and heroine together because they were so unpleasant.

I wonder if the pen pals who don't realize they know each other in real life thing is a common enough trope to be able to steal it and do it right. It might be fun to do a Stealth Geeks in Love story, where hero and heroine work at some uptight, buttoned-down place where anything that might be considered less than serious or professional would be frowned upon, so they can't reveal their true personalities, but then away from work they're both on the same Doctor Who message board and spend hours chatting, and they have no idea it's their co-worker they're chatting with.

I also watched What's Your Number? on HBO, and that was a real Jekyll and Hyde of a movie. On the one hand, it's extremely raunchy and coarse -- something I'd be embarrassed to see on a date -- and the comedy is so broad that at times I thought I was watching a Scary Movie-style spoof because some of the situations, behaviors and characters were too over-the-top to represent anything even semi-realistic. On the other hand, in the midst of all that raunch, the core relationship was surprisingly sweet and romantic.

The gist of the story is that a young woman reads a magazine article about how women who've had more than twenty sexual partners are less likely to end up happily married. When she hits twenty, she panics because she fears that if she ever sleeps with anyone else, she'll never be happily married. Then when she runs into an ex who has improved significantly since they broke up, she realizes that she won't add to her number if she gets back together with an ex. With the help of her hound-dog neighbor who hides out in her apartment when he's trying to escape from the latest woman he's brought home, she sets out to track down all the men she's ever been with to see if there's a chance, but she starts to see that she was the real problem because she was never really being herself with any of them. If you've ever seen a movie before, you know where this is going, but it was still fun to watch it happen. I liked the hero and heroine when they were together. They really seemed to connect, and I could imagine it being a lasting relationship. The fact that they got along so well was part of the conflict, so they skipped the usual romantic comedy bickering, and because she wasn't letting herself sleep with anyone new, that forced the relationship to develop in a way that was about more than just lust.

However, once I started putting any thought into it, some of the messages of the film disturbed me and I had more doubts about their potential future happiness (and I know I'm giving this movie way more thought than it deserves). They were so hung up on that number that they barely touched on the reasons behind her number, which involved her apparently having such low self esteem that she'd practically twist herself in knots to get a man to want to sleep with her, even if she wasn't all that into him. When you're faking an accent through an entire relationship so that you'll be what you think the man will want, you have the kind of problems that probably can't be resolved with a simple "I need to be myself" epiphany. And they never even dealt with his behavior and the problems it implied.

There is the standard "rom com dash" at the end, though I will give this one points for being utterly hilarious (this was one of the elements that seemed to come from a spoof rather than from a real movie) and for acknowledging the silliness of it (at one point, she wonders why she didn't just wait for him at his place). Still, though, it had the common element that bugs me about those things, which is that the other person is supposed to put whatever he's doing on hold to deal with you, just because you're suddenly made a decision. Plus, I guess the mad dash reflects a recurring nightmare I have about rushing to get somewhere, with obstacles popping up along the way, so it's doubly disturbing to me.

I wouldn't say I recommend the movie, but if you've got HBO and some spare time, it might be worth watching, though probably not in mixed company or with your parents. I'd love to watch it with a psychologist and get a professional opinion on the pathology.

Revisiting The Boyfriend School

I had a pretty good day yesterday. I'm enjoying my nice, cool house. I did a couple of rounds of grocery shopping, so I'm well-supplied with food (I'd been running painfully low), and it's mostly good, nutritious food. One thing I like about summer is all the summer fruit, and I've got cherries, strawberries, peaches and grapes, which should take care of my sweet tooth for a while. I've been working on my PR plans and have a few good leads. I started proofreading the latest book, doing my usual reading aloud thing, and instead of reading a chapter and then taking a break I ended up plowing through a lot of it without stopping because I couldn't put it down. There's something about this book that sings to me, which really shows up when I read it out loud. I don't consider myself much of a wordsmith. I write for story, not for beautiful prose, but there are some bits I think are unintentionally brilliant. I didn't do any crafting to shape the words intentionally, but somehow the words I used to convey the story came out really well, if that makes sense, and that popped out to me when I was reading out loud because the words rolled off my tongue. It's so cool when something like that happens. My subconscious must have been firing on all cylinders. I just hope I'm not the only person who reacts to this book this way. And on top of that, I got a couple of pieces of sort of good news. Really, it's more a case of not-bad news, but in a situation where that's actually really good. It involved learning that a couple of doors are definitely still open, which is better than learning that a door has been closed.

Maybe that explains why I was pretty functional this morning and even had some energy, even though I forgot to drink my breakfast tea. I went downstairs to get my mid-morning cup and found my breakfast teacup still sitting beside the teapot. I somehow didn't notice that I never brought it to the table. No wonder breakfast went more quickly than normal.

I was in a bit of a mood earlier this week, and I was between library trips, so I found myself reaching for an old favorite book, The Boyfriend School by Sarah Bird. If it had been published ten years later than it was, it might have been lumped into the chick lit genre, but as it was, when I read it in the early 90s while I was struggling to make myself write romance novels, I had that "this is what I want to read and write" tingle. I got it from the library then, and it was totally out of print at that time. I did a happy dance in the aisles of Half-Price Books when I finally found a copy. While chick lit was going strong, they reissued it in trade paperback with a slightly chick-litty cover, and I bought it at a booksigning for the new book she had coming out. My editor at that time was friends with her, so she'd been warned about me before the signing, which was good because I had one of those trembling violently moments in which I could barely speak. I hadn't yet read that copy, and it's been a while since I re-read that book, so I gave it a whirl.

The story is about a photographer for a shoestring Austin weekly newspaper during the bust years of the 80s who gets assigned to cover a romance writers' convention. She goes in with the smugly superior attitude that's pretty common to reporters writing about the romance genre -- those silly books for silly women -- but gets schooled pretty quickly when the first writer who speaks to her is a jaded ex-journalist. The ex-journalist and her friend, a medievalist whose bestselling historical romances allowed her to escape the confines of academic life, take our heroine under their wings and teach her about the genre, making her actually read some of the books before she writes about them. Then after the conference they support her when she decides to try writing one. She just has one quibble: She doesn't believe any real woman would fall for a romance hero. Real women want nice men with integrity who treat them well. They point out that she rejected the nice guy with integrity they set her up with. As she plunges into writing, she feels like something's holding her back. And then she meets a mysterious stranger who seems to have stepped right out of the pages of a romance novel, and it changes her life.

It's hard for me to be objective about this book because it almost seems like this book was written just for me. I was living in Austin during the period in which the book is set, and I worked for a weekly newspaper one summer. I lived on the edge of the neighborhood where the heroine lives, and so I knew all the places she went. Her post office was my post office, her library branch was my library branch. Plus, I've been to those romance conferences and I know those people (in fact, it turns out that my guess for the inspiration for one of the characters was correct, based on the bonus material in the back of this edition. The speech patterns brought to mind someone totally different from the character who was described, and now I know why). I'm not at all like the heroine and probably would have made different choices than she made, but her life is enough like some things I've been through that I could identify with her. With all that, I can't help but love this book, but I do still think it's a great book beyond that. It has a twist to it that means it becomes a totally different book the next time you read it because reading it with the knowledge of what's really happening changes the story. I love books that do that (something to add to my literary bucket list). It has some fairly profound things to say about love and attraction, fantasy and reality. And it probably explains why it was such a struggle for me to write romances. I've had a lot of crushes, some pretty deep and intense enough that they were easy to mistake for love, but I don't think I've ever been truly in love -- not even in a "real world" way, let alone that earthshattering romance novel way. I'm not sure it's possible to write about that experience with the depth and intensity you need in a romance novel if you haven't experienced it. I can only write about what I wish would happen, and I'm not sure that carries the same weight.

One thing that was interesting from the perspective of reading it now was the way the romance genre has changed. There's something the writers warn the heroine that she shouldn't do in a romance that's now practically required. Sex has become much more important, and not even the flowery, euphemistic kind. The money factor is also very different. In the 80s, a category romance writer could have easily been driving a Mercedes. Now, I'm not sure you could do that just on categories. They don't have nearly the reach they once did. I suspect Amazon had a lot to do with killing that genre. The appeal was the convenience -- you subscribed to a line and every month got a shipment of books that were along the lines of what you liked, so you didn't have to go through the hassle of going to a bookstore. Now you can go online and pick and choose exactly the books you want and have them delivered -- or if you have an e-reader, you can just have them downloaded instantly. The subscriber numbers were dropping drastically when I quit writing for Silhouette more than a decade ago. I wonder what's happened recently -- or have e-books given the category romance new life? I know they've got a longer life now. They used to be on the shelves for only one month, but they stay forever in e-bookstores. Even my old ones are available again.

I would recommend this book to those who like the "smarter" chick lit (that's about something more than dropping designer label names) or for those who have a love/hate relationship with romance novels -- where you like the idea but often find them frustrating. It's also really, really funny.

There was a movie version of this book, with the title changed to Don't Tell Her it's Me (though on the DVD they're apparently calling it The Boyfriend School) that was pretty awful, though I'm not sure if my perspective was skewed because it wasn't exactly like the book I love. Sarah Bird wrote the screenplay, but I still thought it lost whatever charm the book had. For one thing, the setting was changed, for no apparent reason, and I thought that Austin was practically a character in the book. For another, the casting was all wrong and they needlessly changed a lot of critical details about the characters. And it included the "rom com dash" in which the heroine has to make the mad dash across town and publicly humiliate herself, which is definitely not in the book. The movie also mostly takes the guy's point of view when the book is from the woman's perspective. Even the description of the movie spoils the big twist in the book, so if you have plans to read the book, stay away from the IMDB listing or the DVD's Amazon listing.

Romantic Comedy: I'm With Lucy

My old AC is now being dismantled, a little behind schedule. They'd told me "first thing" Monday morning because they like to do as much as possible before it gets hot. So I was out of bed around 6:30 to make sure I was up and dressed before anyone showed up, which was painful, as I'd actually been sleeping well and it was pleasantly cool and comfortable. They didn't get here until after 9 because they had trouble finding my place and called the wrong number to get directions. I guess the installation guys aren't quite the geeks the sales guys were.

My romantic comedy for this weekend was I'm With Lucy, and I was curious what I'd think about it upon rewatching. I first saw it on some cable channel, and I watched it over the phone with a friend. Not long after that, she was diagnosed with cancer, and she died by the end of the year, so that marathon phone call with us watching a movie together was probably one of the last "good" times before I had to call her in the hospital and she was loopy from pain meds. And that tends to shape my memories of the movie. But I found that I did still like it, and there was a lot I missed from having been chatting on the phone while watching. I don't know why this one didn't get a wider release or make a bigger splash. I'd been aware it was being made, but then the first I heard of the finished product was when it came on some cable channel on a Saturday afternoon.

The gist of it is that in a framing story, Lucy (Monica Potter) is trying to persuade a friend to accept a blind date setup by telling her that she may not know what her type really is if she only dates men she chooses that she thinks are her type. By taking blind dates, you get a broader variety and may discover that your type isn't what you thought it was, so you'd never meet the right person without blind dates. And it worked for her. After a really nasty breakup, her sister made her go on a lot of blind dates, and now she's about to marry one of those men. Then we see all her blind dates from that time, but instead of seeing them in sequence, we see them in parallel -- we compare the first meetings of all of them, and then skip around to see various moments of the ups and downs instead of seeing an entire date from start to finish before moving on to the next one. That structure lends a bit of suspense to the usual romantic comedy format. We know one of them worked out, but we don't know which one, and because there are ups and downs with all the first dates, you can't judge by how the first date went, and all the men were at around the same level of fame at that time, so you can't even go with the idea that the most famous one will win. There's John Hannah as a recently divorced scientist, Gael Garcia Bernal as a sexy playwright, Anthony LaPaglia as a macho ex-pro baseball player, Henry Thomas as an uptight businessman who's had a really bad day, and David Boreanaz as a wealthy surgeon. It isn't until near the end of the movie that we start to see what happened after the first dates for some of these relationships and get closer to figuring out which one she's marrying -- and which one she wants to set her friend up with.

And I did like this movie a lot, even removing my personal emotional context from it. As someone who has been on a lot of blind dates, it's fun seeing just how bad they can be, and how what starts badly can end well, and how what starts well can go downhill. Even a bad date with someone who was totally wrong could have its merits and teach something about relationships and people. I enjoyed the sense of suspense that had me truly wondering almost to the end how it would turn out, but with the reassurance that it did work out, so I didn't have to worry about someone trying to upend the genre by having things go wrong entirely.

I wonder why Monica Potter didn't become a bigger star. She was really likable in a few extremely obscure romantic comedies and I think has done a few TV roles (wasn't she in The Practice for a while?), and she's got a nice mix of girl-next-door and snark. I also wonder why we don't see more of Henry Thomas. He makes a great romantic comedy leading man in both this (although the "leading man" is shared among five people) and in I Capture the Castle, but although he works steadily he doesn't seem too worried about stardom. I guess he doesn't need to, since as a kid he had the lead role in one of the biggest movies of all time, and it seems like he mostly stays in Texas and works when he feels like it, which probably means a happier life and which means he's a rare case of a child star who hasn't imploded. I admit to feeling a little creepy about finding myself admiring the little kid from ET, even though it turns out he's not that much younger than I am.

To Wed or Not to Wed

The latest book is off with Mom for a sanity check, so now I have to get back to focusing on preparing for the release of books 5 and 6. I've got a conference call with the person handling the digital release tomorrow, so next week I should have all sorts of crucial details to report.

The guys came out yesterday to look at my AC/heater and figure out what they can do for me, and it turns out that it's going to be a challenge. They were very, very creative with their use of space when they built this house, and there are some quirks to the house. Like, the indoor part of the AC/heating unit is in the bathroom ceiling. They had to write down model numbers, take photos and then go back and do research to figure out what might be available to fit in that space. So I still don't know how many books I'm going to need to sell. They did confirm that the current unit is probably dying. They got out a thermometer and measured the difference in temperature between the air going in and the air coming out, and it's not chilling the way it's supposed to, in spite of the new freon. Whatever new thing they can do, even with my limited options, should be better than what I have now. It will be quieter and more efficient, and they showed why it's so noisy in my bedroom -- the ductwork. There's a fresh-air intake vent in my bedroom that's the wrong size for the unit, so the noise is too much air being sucked into it. Not to mention the fact that the intake vent is literally six inches from the output vent, so the cool/warm air is being sucked right back in instead of being circulated. They said they'd close off that intake vent and enlarge the one in the living room.

What was fun was that they noticed my DVD collection before they even looked at my AC, so they seemed to figure out that I'm a geek and reasonably intelligent, and they gave me the technical explanations without patronizing me. Plus, we had some fun conversations about Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, the Alien movies, etc. And they gave me some suggestions about improving airflow with the existing system -- which fans to turn on, which direction to turn them and when, which doors to open/close -- that made a big difference in the comfort level of the house. I'd always heard that you turned the ceiling fans one way for winter and the other for summer, and the summer way didn't actually seem cooler to me. But they said it's different depending on whether you're using the AC or using the fans to cool, and in the case of the upstairs, whether I'm in that room or not. It feels cooler in that room with the fan going one way, but if I'm not in that room, then I need to reverse the fan and open the doors, and that makes the whole house cooler. They said a fan on the loft would be even better, but that ceiling slopes so much and is so low that I'm afraid anyone taller than I am would be decapitated.

Last night I found a decent romantic comedy movie of all places on the Lifetime Movie Network (their OnDemand channel, so it's probably a few years old). It was called I Me Wed, and it's about a single woman who's perfectly happy being single -- not opposed to marriage, but okay with her life the way it is and therefore not at all desperate to get married. Her friends and family refuse to believe she's happy the way she is and think she's being too picky when she rejects men, and she's getting really fed up with that. When she tells a friend that she's okay being with herself and her friend snarks back, "Why don't you marry yourself, then?" she gets an idea. She announces that she's going to marry herself to get the point across that she's perfectly okay and her commitment to herself means she's not going to settle just so she won't be alone. Of course, she meets the perfect guy soon after that, and just as she's falling in love with him, her marrying herself idea hits the media. She becomes an inspiration to a lot of fed-up single women, and her idea of a simple ceremony to make a point to her family and friends spirals out of control as companies start donating things so she can have the perfect wedding to herself. Then she's stuck in a no-win situation: if she cancels the wedding to herself because she has a boyfriend, then it looks like she was only doing the wedding thing because she was alone and she'll disappoint all those women looking up to her, but if she goes through with a huge wedding to herself while she's got a boyfriend, it looks like she's just being self-centered (not to mention, it's easy to be a Bridezilla when the wedding really is all about you). She has to figure out what a wedding really means and when it really is important to worry about what other people think.

It had Lifetime movie production values -- supposedly set in Boston but filmed in Ottawa, and taking place in April/May but all the stock footage establishing shots of Boston used between scenes showed trees with fall colors, plus a completely no-name probably Canadian cast without even the usual inclusion of one "name" in a cameo role. And there were a few things that irked me, like an extremely stereotypical gay best friend character (all gay men just looooove to plan weddings) and the first kiss leading straight to sex thing that's one of my pet peeves. But otherwise, it was reasonably thought-provoking, I liked both the guy and the girl (he was really cute and exactly my type), I wanted them to get together, there was no bickering at all, they were actually perfect for each other and not doing the usual total opposites thing, the conflict came from the circumstances, they behaved mostly like reasonable adults and reacted in a believable way, and no one was totally right or wrong -- both of them had to do the public affirmation/apology and they had to work it out between them rather than one having to do the mad dash across town and then make a fool of him/herself while groveling.

I guess I particularly related as a never-married person who's been to way too many weddings. They did make a point that she wasn't doing this as a way to get presents. Even at the beginning of the film, she was shocking her friends by buying expensive kitchenware for herself instead of waiting to put it on a wedding registry. As she said at one point, "If I want a waffle iron, I'll buy a waffle iron." But I say it's totally about the presents. If I added up all the money I've spent on wedding presents over the years, I could have really equipped my own kitchen, and since I haven't been married, there's been no occasion for any of those gifts to be reciprocated. But even if I did decide to marry myself and register for gifts, I'd have to hire PIs to track down all the people I've given gifts to. Out of all the weddings I've been to in the past 22 or so years, I'm still in regular real-life contact with one couple and am Facebook friends with a few more. Some of those people did move away, which made staying in touch more difficult, but for the most part, I think it came down to the fact that I was close enough to be invited to the wedding (and to give a gift) but not close enough to remain within their circle of friends when they were no longer part of the same general group with me. We were friends when they were in the church singles group, but they no longer associated with me when they left that group. I did establish a personal policy about ten years ago that if I haven't heard from you in the previous six months and I receive a wedding invitation from you, then I'm going to politely decline and I don't feel obligated to send a gift. If I'm not important enough to be a part of your life otherwise, then I figure you can live without me at your wedding.

I am lucky, though, that I've never felt pressured to be married. The people closest to me know that it's not because I didn't want to be married but rather that I didn't find the right person and am okay enough on my own not to settle. There's no "man that got away" that I rejected for a trivial reason but that I have second thoughts about now and wish I hadn't let him go. I can't imagine living with anyone I've dated or been asked out by. The only ones where I thought it might have worked ended up rejecting me, which is kind of a deal-breaker. I don't really get the "what's wrong with you that you aren't married?" attitude from anyone. I'm more likely to get "what's wrong with men that no one's snatched you up?" But still, it was nice to hear the heroine in this movie saying the things I say about my life and to realize that I still agree with her, in spite of me never having found the perfect guy.

Romantic Comedy: Crazy, Stupid, Love

Yesterday I made five jars of strawberry jam, went to the library and proofread almost half of book 6. This morning, I was at my desk by 8, so I can only wonder what I'll accomplish today.

The one other movie I watched over the weekend was Crazy, Stupid, Love (that was the way it was punctuated on the HBO listings). I found it to be a very frustrating movie because while most of it was very generic and paint-by-numbers, there was a really intriguing story with some truly surprising twists buried in it. If they'd jettisoned a couple of the plot lines and focused on the one with the fun twists, they might have had something good, but I think they were trying for a Love Actually effect with all the various plot lines showing ways that people can be crazy or stupid for love. Or something like that.

So, what's it about? You may need to make a chart. Going by my sense of amount of screentime devoted to the plots, we had Plot A: After 25 years of marriage, Emily (Julianne Moore) tells her husband Cal (Steve Carell) that she's been sleeping with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) and wants a divorce. He numbly moves out, and then when he's loudly bemoaning his fate while drowning his sorrows at a bar, the player who stalks his prey in that bar (Ryan Gosling) takes pity on him and starts tutoring him in how to be a single man. Meanwhile, Emily finds that her co-worker is kind of annoying and she misses her husband, but she's hurt that he didn't even put up a fight when she asked for a divorce, and now that he's become quite the ladies' man, she worries that she's lost him/is pissed off at him. Or something like that.

Plot B involves their thirteen-year-old son, who's in love with the seventeen-year-old babysitter. He stalks her, sends her non-stop text messages and stages public events at which he declares his undying devotion. He's convinced that they're soulmates and that one day she'll realize that their age difference doesn't matter, so he disregards all of her rejections and her pleas to leave her alone. His ardent devotion teaches his parents A Valuable Lesson in not giving up on love. Or something like that not involving a restraining order. Meanwhile, the babysitter is in love with Cal, and when he becomes single she hopes it's her chance, if only she can make him see her as something other than a kid.

Plot C centers on the player, who finally comes across a woman on whom his lines don't work (Emma Stone). She recognizes them for the lines they are and laughs at them as being seriously cheesy. She's also not interested because she has a lawyer boyfriend who's the exact opposite of the player type (Josh Groban -- yes, the singer, but as an actor he seems to be cornering the market on clueless dorks). But when her boyfriend disappoints her by not proposing, she goes back to the bar, orders the player to take her home, and very soon the player finds himself needing to ask his married friend for advice on how to have a relationship because he has no clue what to do when he actually wants to keep seeing a woman after the initial conquest.

Plot C was the one with all the real surprises and fun and with the actors/characters with any real life to them. Almost all of the laughs in the movie for me came from this plot, and it had one of the most surprising and romantic scenes I've seen in a romantic comedy in a long time when the player takes the challenging woman home, and she proceeds to analyze and laugh at each step of his usual seduction process, and along the way he ends up breaking every one of his own seduction rules, which leads to the night being far more intimate than either of them planned, and in a totally different way. As far as I was concerned, you could drop Plot B entirely because it was seriously creepy and led to the worst and most contrived scenes in the movie. I did like the turnaround of the single guy tutoring the long-married guy in being single and kind of saving his marriage and then the single guy needing the married guy to tutor him in having a relationship, so we'd need to keep parts of that plot, but we could keep it mostly offscreen. Then we could actually develop the context. We didn't see enough of Emma Stone's relationship with her boyfriend to understand why she turned from him to the player, and they didn't capitalize on that turnabout where he suddenly needed tutoring from his married friend. They skipped straight to a few weeks later so we didn't see those fumbling first steps where he was totally clueless. There was also a lot of fun potential with her snarky best friend, who could easily have stolen the movie. I spent the whole movie thinking she looked familiar and figuring she must have been some teen actor grown up, but then after I saw the closing credits I realized she was just seriously out of context because I knew her as Agent Lee from NCIS, the lawyer-turned-agent who had the semi-kinky affair with Jimmy Palmer and then turned out to be the mole stealing secrets. She was so funny and perfect as the romantic comedy snarky best friend that I couldn't place her from a more serious role in a crime show.

In general, there were some great moments, but otherwise there was a lot that annoyed me about this movie. I was watching some of the featurettes on the When Harry Met Sally DVD, and in one of them, they were talking about something I hadn't realized about that movie that's probably one of the reasons I love it so much: the man and woman are given equal weight. Neither is made the buffoon or butt of the joke, neither is totally right or wrong, neither is the bad guy. I've found that a lot of romantic comedies, especially the ones I consider "cynical," have the policy that the man is always wrong, probably because they figure that women will make up most of the audience, and it's a way to pander to the audience. That's one of the problems with this movie. With Plot A, the wife was the one who cheated and who asks for a divorce, and yet the movie acts like she's right and he's wrong, he's the one who didn't fight for her, he has to move out, he's in the wrong for having other relationships after she cheats and asks for the divorce, and he's the one who has to win her back. It's very one-sided in a situation where there's wrong on both sides. If she hadn't cheated and if it had just been about her feeling like he'd given up, it would have made more sense, but if you're unhappy with your marriage, maybe you should talk to your husband about that, go into marriage counseling, take a vacation together, or something other than cheat and jump straight to divorce. If asking for divorce was meant to shake him up and force him to fight, that's a rather passive-aggressive way of going about it because it's no-win for him. If he does put up a fight, then he looks like he's controlling and not respecting her wishes, but if he doesn't fight it means he doesn't care. I felt like, given the circumstances, she should have been the one trying to get him back when she realized divorce wasn't really what she wanted. Then even in the plot I liked there was a bit of that "the woman is always right" thing going on. We didn't get the context to know what their relationship was like, but she was the one who decided that he was going to propose when he promised a surprise. I thought his actual surprise was far more appropriate to the situation and it would have been a bad time to propose, and I thought his reason for not proposing, that he wasn't ready for it, was perfectly valid. And yet that was apparently meant to be reasonable grounds for her rushing off and flinging herself at the hot guy who tried to pick her up in a bar once. Now, maybe if we'd learned that he always had some excuse for not proposing and she'd realized he was never going to commit it would have made sense, but as shown in the movie, he was a jerk because he didn't propose when she thought he was going to, even though she wasn't sure she wanted him to -- another no-win. If he had proposed, it would have probably been one of those humiliating public "I'll have to think about it" situations. I hate it when movies do stuff like that (the reason I can't watch the end of Notting Hill -- I hate that he's the one who has to do the chase and the public humiliation show of devotion when she's the one who's jerked him around, denied being with him and wrongfully mistrusted him at every turn. She should have had to be the one to publicly acknowledge and apologize to him). As a woman, I can hold my own without being propped up by screenwriters, and I'm okay with a woman being in the wrong when she really is wrong. I don't hate men and want to see them suffer for me even when I'm wrong.

But the really frustrating thing for me is that I can't steal this story. I sometimes get some of my best ideas from books or movies that have some spark of something interesting that wasn't capitalized on, and by the time I've written the story that I think it should have been, no one would recognize the source. But the parts of this one I liked had just enough originality and just enough really surprising twists that I can't take the parts that worked and write what should have been without the source being really obvious, and without those parts it would be a pretty generic story.

Romantic Comedy: The Very Thought of You

I normally don't post on weekends, but I have a feeling this is going to be a movie-intensive weekend, so if I don't get one of them out of the way today, I'll end up with a more epic than usual post.

Last night, I seemed to be in A Mood (yes, it deserves capital letters), and I couldn't face the idea of watching a movie I knew would piss me off, which meant my Bad Romantic Comedy project was a no-go, but I was afraid to go for an unknown quantity. One of the reasons I buy movies I've already seen (and reread books) is that there are times when you need just the right thing, and getting something that seems like it might be right but turns out to be wrong can ruin everything. The only safe approach is going with a known quantity. Since I highlighted it in my list, since I hadn't watched it in ages, and since I needed a movie just that length, I decided to watch The Very Thought of You (the original title that's on the DVD cover shown on the IMDB page is Martha -- Meet Frank, Daniel, and Laurence).

The story's about three guys who have been best friends since childhood. Now they've grown up to be a superficial big-shot music producer (Tom Hollander) and a former child star turned embittered unemployed actor (Rufus Sewell) who now resent/disrespect each other and the nice-guy peacemaker caught in the middle (Joseph Fiennes and His Amazing Eyelashes). Their friendship is strained, perhaps to the breaking point, when all three of them independently meet and fall in love with the same woman (Monica Potter), an American who got fed up with her life, went to the airport and bought the first ticket she could afford to go anywhere else -- and ended up in London. What makes this film unique is the story structure because we see it play out from the perspectives of each of the three guys, and it isn't until we see the last story that we find out what's really been going on all along. It's not a Rashomon kind of thing with subjective viewpoints. What we see is the objective truth. We're just limited to the information each guy has at that time. The first two stories take place more or less sequentially, but the third story overlaps the first two and fills in the gaps. It's hard to talk about it without telling which guy of the three is Mr. Right, but then that's pretty obvious even from the start of the movie, since it's told in a framing story with the Joseph Fiennes character telling all this to his psychiatrist neighbor (Ray Winstone).

So, rating it as a romantic comedy, I'll first tackle the "is it romantic?" question. I think so, though the romance comes later in the film and isn't at all your typical movie romance. For one thing, this isn't any kind of "opposites attract" thing that involves lots of bickering and witty banter. This romance is the rare case in movies of the two people being absolutely perfect for each other from the start. They're soulmates. They have a tendency to say the same things (like he'll say a line we previously heard her say before they even met) and can finish each other's sentences within hours of meeting. They figure out pretty quickly that this is IT. The romantic conflict comes from the friends, with him having to wrestle with the dilemma of choosing loyalty to his lifelong friends or being with this woman he's just met but who may be the love of his life -- and then him having to deal with the fallout when she discovers that the three guys pursuing her know each other, and she has to wonder how real any of it is. I find it very refreshing to see a relationship where they're obviously compatible and it's things outside the relationship that cause the problems, and it means I'm really pulling for them to work it out and get together -- and I think it will work out for them even after the cameras stop rolling.

On the "is it funny?" side, it's more of a wry sense of amusement rather than a lot of big, comic scenes. A lot of the humor comes from the characters. The two friends are rather ridiculous, and it's fun to see how unimpressed she is with their antics that they think are guaranteed seduction. The entire opening sequence involves the over-the-top things the music producer does to try to get closer to her and the way her common sense foils them all (and in ways that undermine a lot of romantic comedy tropes -- she acts like a real person would act here, not like a romantic comedy heroine). I've never thought of Rufus Sewell as funny. He's generally more the smoldering type, but he plays on that typecasting here to show how ridiculous that smoldering, bitter actor type can be. I think most of the laugh-out-loud moments are from him. Joseph Fiennes is mostly the straight man, but he gets a subtle kind of funny as his frustration builds to the breaking point even as the surge of emotions leaves him totally frozen and inarticulate. His scenes with the neighbor as he tells the story are some of the funniest in the movie, and I think the biggest laugh in the movie goes to Ray Winstone in one of those scenes. It's also surprising just how funny it can be when two people who are perfect for each other find each other. They become total dorks with the giddiness of that and with the way they're totally in sync without realizing it. You probably won't laugh until you cry, but you'll smile a lot.

I first saw this movie on TV on a weekend afternoon, either on some cable channel or on a local station back in the day when the local stations would air something other than infomercials when they weren't airing a network sporting event on weekend afternoons. Because of that story structure, it's the kind of movie you want to rewatch once you know what was going on, but it was impossible to find. I finally found a VHS copy at a used bookstore. I don't think it got much of a theatrical release because I'd never heard of it until it came on TV, and normally I'd be all over a British romantic comedy starring Joseph Fiennes and His Amazing Eyelashes (yes, they deserve equal billing). I do wonder why he hasn't become a bigger star. I think he's better looking than his more famous brother. He's been in some big films (for crying out loud, he was Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love), and he seems to be a really talented actor. I guess he's mostly stayed busy on the British stage and has avoided the limelight, so he's probably happier that way, but it limits my opportunities to be spellbound by The Amazing Eyelashes (seriously, those eyelashes are incredible. He must have had to learn to synchronize his blinking and walking so he doesn't trip. I hope he doesn't wear glasses or they'll be constantly smudged).

There is a kind of rough, low-budget quality to this film, but for me, it scratches my romantic comedy itches while breaking most of the romantic comedy molds, and that's a real achievement. Now I need to see if I can find this on DVD because I think my VHS tape is disintegrating.

And now today I'm off to see Brave with some friends.

Romantic Comedies -- a List

In response to a reader question, here's a starting point list of romantic comedy films. I'm mostly going by memory and what's in my collection. This list is likely to grow or change because I imagine titles will be popping into my head for days. (And, it's already happening)

Classic films (films that came out before I was born)
The Philadelphia Story (love, love, love -- fabulous dialogue)
Bringing Up Baby
The Awful Truth
It Happened One Night
My Favorite Wife (there's a later version called Move Over Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner, but I like the B&W Irene Dunne/Cary Grant version better)
The Shop Around the Corner (far superior to the remake, You've Got Mail)
Charade

Historical (set in a time period different from when they were made -- costume romantic comedies)
Pride and Prejudice -- the miniseries with Colin Firth (I wasn't crazy about the film version with Keira Knightley)
Sense and Sensibility (the Emma Thompson version)
Emma (just about any version -- I think I've liked all the recent ones. There was an A&E version with a young Kate Beckinsale, then there was the Gwyneth Paltrow big-screen version and then a more recent PBS miniseries)
A Room with a View
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Much Ado About Nothing (the Emma Thompson/Kenneth Branagh version)
Down With Love (a spoof of the early 60s Doris Day films)
Shakespeare in Love
I Capture the Castle
Cold Comfort Farm
(the bottom three might not technically be romances as two of them don't have the happy romantic ending and one hardly deals with the romantic relationship, but they still scratch the romantic comedy itch for me)

Contemporary (meaning I saw them first-run or could have seen them first-run)
Not all of these are brilliant movies. I may have some issues with some of them, but for the most part, I don't think any of them are truly bad movies that I would consider "cynical."
Bridget Jones's Diary (but not the sequel)
While You Were Sleeping
When Harry Met Sally …
Love Actually
The Holiday
Letters to Juliet (I've only watched it once and liked it then, but I haven't had a chance to revisit and be more analytical about it)
You've Got Mail (but not as good as the original)
The Very Thought of You (had a different title for British release -- kind of obscure, but very interesting because it plays a lot with perception and viewpoint)
I'm With Lucy (another obscure one, but interesting because of the story structure because it's non-linear -- the heroine is getting ready for her wedding and telling the story of how she met her husband, and then the stories of several men she dated in the past year are woven together, but we don't know which one she's marrying)
Clueless
Four Weddings and a Funeral (except for the ending)
Mrs. Winterbourne
Notting Hill (except for the ending)
Office Space
The Fabulous Baker Boys
Working Girl
Hope Floats
Sleepless in Seattle (though I really don't think of this one as that romantic, since they don't even meet until the end)
Romancing the Stone

Paranormal/Fantasy
Tangled (yes, the cartoon, the one Disney fairy tale movie that is structurally a romantic comedy)
Kate and Leopold (trivia note: this screenwriter wrote the Enchanted, Inc. screenplay that didn't get produced. I'd love to see what he did with it to see if I like it or to see why Universal didn't like it)
Just Like Heaven
Sliding Doors (I'm not sure how comedic this one really is, but it works when I'm moody and need to both laugh and cry)
The Princess Bride (not really focused on the romance, but still, it has to be on all lists of movies to watch)
Enchanted (duh, can't believe I forgot this one)

The Bad Ones
To be honest, I've enjoyed some of these, but mostly, they irk me and I wish they could have been done better
Leap Year (just a few tweaks to the script and it could have been decent)
Raising Helen
Something Borrowed
28 Dresses
Knocked Up (I know this was very successful, but I hated it, mostly because I loathe that overgrown frat boy man child thing)
Must Love Dogs (I read the book, but somehow the movie was bland)
The Wedding Date (an abomination -- they completely missed the point of the book it was based on)
New in Town -- I couldn't get past the first 20 minutes on HBO, so it has to go on a "bad" list
Because I Said So -- I think I have a rant written somewhere about this one. The problem isn't so much the cynicism behind it as it is the fact that it doesn't seem to realize it's about pathological behavior. It had potential, though
Addicted to Love -- something Meg Ryan would probably want off her resume. She tried to act edgy. It didn't work.
French Kiss -- I saw this on a date and still barely remember it