My favorite rom-com-and this is hard-is “Love & Basketball,” with Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan. “You’ve Got Mail” is one of the greats, I agree. You can leave with this ideal version of them in your head, feeling high on love and hopeful about love for yourself. And just like with the end of a Shakespeare comedy or the end of the Jane Austen novel, you don’t really see the couple together, so you don’t have to actually get into the nitty-gritty of what that might look like. So, the joy and delight in that gives one a hope for the future. What does it say about you? Someone like Nora Ephron can take us on that process over the course of twelve years, in “When Harry Met Sally,” or over the course of a few months, in “You’ve Got Mail,” which I’m very prepared to argue are both crucial films of the twentieth century. Not in a heavy, hard, belabored sense, but, you know: you’ve been in love with the wrong person you’ve mistaken someone’s identity you’ve been attracted to this one and you should be attracted to that one. Well, first of all, who doesn’t love love? I don’t think that romantic comedies are as much about learning about what couples are as they are about the process of attraction-and ideally, in the process of attraction, something about self-discovery. But have chemistry, wit, and pleasure been lost in the process? I recently sat down with my fellow-critics Vinson Cunningham and Alexandra Schwartz to take stock. Stalwarts like Jennifer Lopez have continued to churn out variations on familiar themes, and new issue-centric romantic comedies such as the race-relations-focussed “You People” and Billy Eichner’s “ Bros,” billed as the first gay rom-com from a major studio, have attempted to engage with the politics of today. In their heyday in the eighties, nineties, and early two-thousands, rom-coms-from “ When Harry Met Sally” and “Pretty Woman” to “ My Big Fat Greek Wedding”-dependably provided us with a just-realistic-enough fantasy of what the path to a modern relationship could look like, teaching us not only about love but also about the particular social and cultural conditions in which it blooms. And while shows like “Love Life” and “ Starstruck” have brought the genre to the small screen, successful features are increasingly few and far between. The connection between love interests, once a central element of the rom-com, has in recent years seemed secondary at best now it’s actually plausible that someone might try to add it in post. Regardless of whether his description of the “You People” situation was accurate, his words-and the flurry of online commentary that followed-indicated a broader issue. The kiss we saw onscreen, Schulz said, was actually simulated via C.G.I. As the movie’s climactic scene was being shot, Schulz alleged, the two romantic leads, Lauren London and Jonah Hill, stopped short of locking lips. On a podcast the other day, the comedian Andrew Schulz, one of the stars of the new Kenya Barris-directed romantic comedy “ You People,” dropped a bomb of sorts.
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