The decline of romance

Both this week's Time magazine and The Guardian have articles which lament the current state of how romance is dealt with in the cinema. The Guardian article is particularly acerbic, ripping into the spate of recent films which are basically "male loser made good by the love of a good woman" films. I can't say that I have seen the films that Joe Queenan complains about, but I suspect I would share most of his reaction.

It is true when you think about it: Hollywood has become very bad at decent romance stories for quite a number of years now. The last really good romantic film with both male and female interest that I can think of would probably be Shakespeare in Love, and that is nearly a decade ago now. I saw it first on an airplane, and on the old projection screen set-up (not the new fangled seat-back LCD,) and still I felt affected by the ending.

In the Time magazine article, Richard Curtis, whose films I actually don't care for, does say something that sounds about right:

"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," he 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."

There is also the point that some real life love stories really are so remarkable that you imagine if they were written up as fiction they wouldn't be believed. Case in point: this week's Australian Story episode.