Accepts Itself

Rating: Null/10 (7 April 2008)

Even the lowest brow films reward if you allow yourself to watch the machinery of the thing as well as the thing itself.
The narrative itself is unrewarding. The humor is weak, the romance ineffective. But what the thing actually is charms.
A standard romance has the wonderful girl, the clumsy guy who gets the girl, loses the girl by some complication, and then gets her back, usually involving some public, folded activity. These things are billed as date movies and have highly evolved values for both men and women.
The woman's stuff is usually handled by making the guy solidly desirable at root, and supplementing that with some truth about the internals of a woman's life. But the formula is so worn out that studios put heavy attention into innovations that tap the same energy and use the same bankable conventions, but in new ways.
So here we have a new twist on the woman's angle. Oh, it has something for the guys, who apparently can be appeased by a few jokes about how doofy we are. The fact that so little will carry us while other complicated narrative dynamics are spun, says more about how doofy we are than the truth of any joke.
Those complicated dynamics have to do with the girl-to-girl conversation about the world they have to tolerate. By that I mean the wall of incompetence they face in emotional support. So this is a romance with a loser but its okay because all men are losers.
Interestingly, it works. It works better than I would have expected, and that's trying to see it from both sides.
Its a clever experiment perhaps two steps closer to defusing the fantasy of the genre is a self-critical fashion.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.