I guess the beginning of the school year has all of us running around in circles. Nobody’s posted for a week! Ack!!
On my list of “things I might blog about someday”–which is getting woefully short, and after I blog about this, will need to be refreshed–is the TIME Magazine article from last week called “Who Killed The Love Story?” in which the author wonders just that, in regard to movies. Dramatic romances, like Titanic, have pretty much disappeared from the silver screen. Romantic comedies…aren’t very romantic any more. They’re full of bathroom humor and fart jokes–the sorts of things that send my 6- and 3-year-old grandsons into hysterical giggles–and toss in a little implausible romantic denouement at the end and call them “romantic.”
NOT!
Actors are apparently blaming the studios. Studios are busy blaming the actors, and movie-goers are starving.
“If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it’s called searingly realistic, even though it’s never happened in the history of mankind,” [Richard Curtis, writer of such indelible romances as Four Weddings and Notting Hill,] notes. “Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you’re accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.”
I guess romance “don’t get no respect” no matter where it turns up. Except that romance IS alive and well in books. In fact, it flourishes. It blooms. And women are buying it by the bushel full. So why isn’t it at the movies?
The article covers the primary reasons. I’m just here wondering if there’s anything we romance lovers can do about it, and whether we really want to?
Opinions, ladies?
September 10, 2007 at 12:28 am
Well, I guess now you know why I haven’t been in a movie theater since 1984! Sorry, but I want my romance! I want the HEA and I don’t want to spend money to be depressed. Same goes for my reading. I will always choose a romance over the current bestseller–why spend time reading something that will depress me?
September 10, 2007 at 9:13 am
I know what you’re saying, Gail. There are still some decent romantic movies out there, but not as many as I’d like.
What amuses me is how much romance there is in supposedly non-romance movies–think Speed or Desperado–but if you try to tell someone they’re actually romances that just happen to also be action/adventure flicks, they’d probably argue with you. I often try to get people interested in romance novels by saying, “If you liked such-and-such a movie, you’d like such-and-such a romance or author,” but they don’t always believe me.