Category: Updates

Readers join the thread:

I am a former studio film executive. A romantic comedy is one of the most, if not the most, difficult script to write. When a good one comes along, and it happens very rarely, the studios go into a feeding frenzy. A good romantic comedy is cheap to make and its return on investment ratio is much higher than most genres. If you are a young screenwriter with no connections writing on spec, throw away your action script and write a good, original romantic comedy. You probably will not succeed at it – the premise is that they are really hard to write well – but if you do, you will have suitors.

Another sighs:

Your post on the supposedly insidious effect the growth of the Chinese film market has had on the American romantic comedy would be a great piece of alarmist culture-bait if only it had a shred of truth to it. The simple fact is that the Chinese market embraced an enormous romcom hit, Finding Mr. Right [trailer above], only two years ago. It was atop the box office for four weeks in China and made well over $80 million – a hit by anyone’s standards.

The film is no masterpiece, but then many of the romantic comedies so lamented by the writers you quote weren’t such great shakes either.

Ironically, the movie explicitly references Sleepless in Seattle as it dealt with birth tourism – the trend of wealthy Chinese women to have their children in the U.S. to secure a coveted American passport. It also touched on issues of materialism and corruption in Chinese in a lighthearted but pretty direct fashion.

Part of the problem with the explosion of online film blogging is that many of the people writing about movies don’t have much knowledge of actual industry practices, especially foreign-market practices. That leads to writing that basically relies on cultural stereotypes (“Oh, the Chinese, they don’t laugh at the same things we do – they’re foreign.”) or what the writers pick up on a jaunt or two to an international film festival. Nor do they really wish for the return of such middlebrow, middle-class genres like the romantic comedy (or the straight drama – which has almost entirely migrated to cable television), they’re much more compelled by art house fare and the chance to denounce tentpole pictures like the latest Transformers movie).

No, what’s really killed the romantic comedy is the death of general audience film critic in the mode of Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael (who was never a fan of the romcom form, but certainly of many of the performers in the films themselves), which is tied to the crisis in print publishing. There are no more tastemakers for those audiences, so they’ve scattered. What’s left is a critical wasteland where virtually anyone can assert anything without fear of being read critically. Want to prompt some mouse clicks? Here’s a piece on how those Chinese don’t like romance – or laughter.

Update from a reader:

Your reader’s response to O’Brien’s article misses the point of the argument. It is not that Chinese dislike romance or comedy, rather that there is a translation problem. The more reliant on word play and cultural specific jokes don’t play well. If a New York RomCom was to make an Eliot Spitzer joke, Americans, more or less, would understand the joke and Chinese would probably have problems with it. This of course works both ways; Americans could not understand a joke that used Xi Jinping from a Chinese movie (if that was aloud). O’Brien isn’t arguing that foreign people don’t laugh, rather that the nuance of language, its subtle gibes, its turn of the phrases, its reference points are hard to translate, while big thing goes boom is an easy translation. No one has ever gone to see a Michael Bay film because of the dialogue … in fact language that is lost in translation probably makes them better films.

Food trendsetters, Franz Lidz observes, are looking past sea urchins’ spiny exterior:

In the brave new world of fine dining, the roe of the humble urchin—a shellfish once cursed as a pest to lobstermen, mocked as “whore’s eggs” and routinely smashed with hammers or tossed overboard as unsalable “bycatch”—is a prized and slurpily lascivious delicacy. Unlike caviar, which is the eggs of fish, the roe of the urchin is its wobbly gonads. Every year more than 100,000 tons of them slide down discerning throats, mainly in France and Japan, where the chunks of salty, grainy custard are known as uni and believed to be an uplifting tonic, if not an aphrodisiac. The Japanese exchange urchins as gifts during New Year celebrations.

Lidz profiles Roderick Sloan, who harvests the creatures off the coast of Norway. According to one chef, Sloan’s plunder tastes “like you’re making out with the sea.” Updates from several readers:

My wife eats sea urchins every year when we go to Greece.  Her uncle collects them from the ocean in front of her father’s house there.  Just a little lemon and olive oil goes into the sea urchin and then you scoop it out with fresh bread.

But my sea urchin story has nothing to do with eating them.  My wife used to have warts on the bottom of her foot.

She didn’t deal with them quickly and picked at them (which you are not supposed to do) and when she finally did nothing worked to get rid of them.  She tried the acid pads, she went to the doctor and got them frozen she even tried something where they infected her foot with yeast.  I wanted her to deal with it because I got them a couple of time on my foot from her.  (I dealt with them quickly using the acid pads from the drug store and got rid of them).  Her doctor told her that surgery would be the only way to get rid of them and that she would be on crutches for months they were in so deep.

Well, one day in Greece she stepped on a sea urchin.  Like I said, they live in the ocean right below the house in Greece where we swim in the afternoons.  It was painful and many a spike had to be tweezed out of her foot. Still, we couldn’t get all of them out (they break off when you try to pull them out with the tweezers). A month later she noticed that the warts were gone.  She told her doctor who was equally amazed. I don’t know how or why but stepping on a sea urchin killed off the warts on her foot!

The attached photo is of the cove were we swim in the afternoons where my wife stepped on the sea urchin.  Look for the house that is closest to where I took the photo – a white blob with a red door facing the camera – then look to the left and slightly up the hill: that’s my father-in-law’s house.  It’s our P-town.

A less happy story:

Years ago I spent six months in Cairo, Egypt, having been hired by an Egyptian family to help with the rehabilitation of their brain-injured son. We spent the hot month of August  at a villa on the Mediterranean coast just west of Alexandria. They knew my fondness for seafood (I’m from North Carolina), so one morning they brought me a tray of freshly caught sea urchins with some cut lemons. After they showed me which part of the strange interior to eat, I consumed the entire tray.

Almost exactly one month later, I came down with a raging case of hepatitis A and spent the next month in bed. My employer (my Egyptian patient’s father) told me that I must have eaten some bad street food in Cairo. I quickly thought back and remembered the sea urchins. I later learned that raw sewage was being released into the sea at Alexandria. I never told the family that in their effort to give me a treat, they had unwittingly fed me the contaminated urchins and nearly destroyed my liver!

Meanwhile, another recommends for stepping on urchins:

Have someone urinate on the wound. No really. It softens the spines and allows you to pull them out. I guess you can use vinegar if you’re not into golden showers, but on a beach far from civilization, it might be the only option.

(Top photo of sea urchin served at the Hungry Cat, a restaurant in Santa Barbara, via Roger Braunstein)

Seven years ago this month, Pope Benedict issued the document Summorum Pontificum, clarifying the legitimacy of the old Latin Mass and giving support to those who remained attached to older rite. Michael Brendan Daugherty praises him as a “brave pope” for doing so, a man who did a “great service for culture and the arts, for the whole world — even for nonbelievers”:

Why does it matter to nonbelievers? Because beauty matters to everyone. In 1971, Agatha Christie, not a Catholic, was so appalled at the disappearance of the traditional Mass and the effect this would have on English culture that she signed a petition to Pope Paul VI to keep it alive in England. It read, in part:

The rite in question, in its magnificent Latin text, has also inspired a host of priceless achievements in the arts — not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians. [Traditio]

Because of Benedict’s intervention, my own parish in Norwalk, Conn., is treated not only to Gregorian chant, but to Renaissance-era motets, and Masses composed by Morales and Monteverdi. It is an aesthetic high crime that so much of the modern church continues to force saccharine and theologically insipid hymns like “Here I am, Lord” on its people, while leaving William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus in a dusty attic.

Also remarking on the anniversary of the Summorum Pontificum, Nicholas Frankovich offers an analogy for understanding what draws traditionalist Catholics to the Latin Mass:

Catholicism lacks as yet a taxonomy that would do justice to the sensibility of the Catholic whose receptors for tradition are especially keen. Contemporary Judaism, with its three main branches—Orthodox (thesis), Reform (antithesis), and Conservative (synthesis)—offers a reasonable model, although, as with any analogy, it will break down if pressed too hard. It will serve its purpose if handled gingerly.

Fifty years ago, in the eyes of many of their Conservative and Reform coreligionists, Orthodox Jews were dinosaurs, eccentric holdouts incapable of adapting to modernity; today, in New York City, the percentage of Jewish children who are Orthodox has been estimated at about 60 percent. When I consider the large young families filling out the pews at traditional Latin Masses I have attended in recent years, and when I read reports of newly ordained priests electing to say their first Masses according to the old missal, I wonder whether the Catholic Church in America may be on the same course but lagging by a few generations.

Update from a reader:

You picked the wrong hymn with which to condemn more modern worship. “Here I Am Lord” is theologically demanding, and – at least sung as I’ve heard it by a thousand hearty Methodists at our annual conference – far from saccharine. (The YouTube version you linked to is ethereal in the worst sense – here’s a much better one.) Catholics, in a poll, picked it as their favorite hymn; Methodists placed it second behind “Amazing Grace.” What’s funny about Michael Brendan Daugherty picking on it is that there are indeed a lot of vapid modern hymns; he managed to pick the meatiest and most musically powerful one to ridicule. Lovers of the Latin Mass can sometimes come off as whiny about other possibilities. Subolesco!

(Video: performance of Ave Verum Corpus by William Byrd)

Last week, after Target asked customers not to bring guns into its stores, Waldman commented that “just as there’s a culture of guns, and cultures where guns are plentiful, there are also tens of millions of Americans for whom an absence of guns is a cultural value”:

Despite what some extreme gun advocates believe, no right is unlimited, whether it’s your right to own a gun or your right to practice your religion or your right to freedom of speech. But beyond the legal limits, there are also the limits we all respect in order to have a society where we can get along despite our differences. My neighbor has a First Amendment right to write pornographic “Hunger Games” fan fiction, but if he hands his manuscripts to my kids he’s just being a creepy dirtbag, First Amendment or not. And depending on the laws of your state, you may have a legal right to take your rifle down to the Piggly Wiggly. But that doesn’t mean that doing so doesn’t make you a jerk.

Barton Hinkle is sort of on the same page. Though staunchly pro-gun rights, he argues that the antics of the open carry movement are bad for the cause:

Gun-rights advocates who delight in making suburban mothers nervous are practicing libertarian brutalism. They resemble those abortion-rights supporters who think it’s funny to wear a shirt that says, “Why did the fetus cross the road? Because they moved the dumpster.” Feeling put-upon, they have an urge to lash out at the other side, to rub the other side’s nose in the dirt and teach it a lesson. But lashing out rarely achieves much. Often such brutalism does nothing but generate resentment. Having a given right means never having to show consideration for how others feel about it, if you don’t want to. But advocates for individual rights should want to. We make a more persuasive case for liberty when we show such consideration. If, as one of the Carytown gun-toters put it, they wish to raise awareness about “responsible gun ownership,” then behaving responsibly would be a good place to start.

Update from a reader, one of several skeptical of Hinkle’s quote:

You quote Barton Hinkle as saying at reason.com that those who flaunt open-carry are like “those abortion-rights supporters who think it’s funny to wear a shirt that says, ‘Why did the fetus cross the road? Because they moved the dumpster.'” That didn’t pass the smell test for me – sounded sort of like “welfare queen driving a Cadillac” apocrypha. A Google search on that phrase doesn’t bring up anything except standard-issue “dead-baby” jokes (not using “fetus”), and certainly no T-shirts. What is Hinkle’s source for this? Because I can’t imagine anyone buying or wearing such a shirt, and I was surprised you quoted it unquestioningly. I’d comment at reason.com, but that’s predictably turned into a 2nd Amendment slugfest.

Megan Garber has her own theory about why the genre is struggling:

[T]he truth is that romantic comedies are, as works of art and pieces of culture, terrible. They are usually some ungodly, unsexy combination of: stale, trite, silly, and formulaic. They are often offensively anti-feminist. The generous reading of all this is that recent films and their creators became victims, essentially, of the innovator’s dilemma: They got too good at obeying their own, once-successful formulas – and failed to see beyond them.

The less generous reading is that film executives and creators failed to see the culture changing around them. The rom-com industrial complex – the cultural institution charged with capturing romance as a kind of ritual – failed to recognize the evolution of romance itself.

Meanwhile, a reader who writes about box-office trends offers some context, while another offers a few recommendations:

Romantic comedies aren’t weak because the male 18-24 audience dominates the box office. Indeed, the headline over the last year has been the collapse of that group among US moviegoers. Moviegoing is skewing older and a bit more female.

The need to capture a worldwide audience is one reason many genres don’t get fuller attention, but romcoms can be made relatively inexpensively, and several female-oriented films over the last few months have been considerable successes. Remember that there’s a lag of around two years between when films are greenlit and when they hit the screen. So romcoms might come back in the US. Yes, many American comedies don’t translate internationally, but a Pretty Woman would likely be just as big today as it was in 1990 (much bigger, with inflation).

Update from a reader:

I adore the movies and go as often as I can (but not to the multiplexes, which seem to be increasingly dumbed down). I prefer smaller indy films, and there are excellent indy rom coms which are neither trite nor anti-feminist. In the last month I’ve seen two excellent indy rom coms…. The Lunchbox and In a World Where…

The Lunchbox refutes the lie that romcoms cannot bridge cultures. It’s is an Indian film about a uniquely Indian system but which spoke beautifully and intelligently to longing in an unfulfilled life. I, a working American mother, related very much to the young Indian housewife at the center of the story, and her neighbor reminded me a great deal of my Puerto Rican mother-in-law. And all without innuendo about sex. The closest this film came to nudity was the heroine removing her jewelry in the evening.

In a World Where…, written, directed, starring and produced by Lake Bell, includes many romcom cliches including mistaken identity, the overlooked love interest, etc., but as a humorous side plot in this tale of a woman fighting to make it in a male-dominated industry.

If the big studios only took the time and effort to make movies that were not so dumbed down in the way they have every movie Kate Hudson and Jennifer Anniston ever starred in, maybe they could draw me back to the multiplex.