Tag: romantic comedies
Albert Brooks Everlasting – The Atlantic
There are two observations in Defending My Life, the new documentary about Albert Brooks by his lifelong friend and fellow filmmaker Rob Reiner, that perfectly capture the imprint that Brooks has made, and continues to make, on American culture.
The first comes from Conan O’Brien: “Albert broke the sound barrier,” the talk-show host says. It was through Brooks’s now-legendary mix of originality, absurdity, exuberance, and sheer brilliance that comedians realized what comedy could be—that “there’s this other place you
Rose Matafeo Is Reconstructing the Rom-Com
If romantic comedies are to be believed, airports are extremely dramatic locales. It isn’t uncommon for characters to sprint through the departures terminal (“Love Actually”), confess their feelings by the baggage claim (“Garden State”), or fall in love with a stranger at the gate (“Sleepless in Seattle”). “Starstruck,” whose second season was just released on HBO Max, takes a different approach. When the heroine, Jessie, intentionally misses her flight home to New Zealand, choosing instead to stay in England with
America Needs a Rom-Com Bailout
The romantic comedy was once a tentpole of Hollywood. The genre defined A-list careers, won awards for studios, and made piles of cash. Then one day, rom-coms seemed a thing of the past, and their relative absence from theaters has been an open mystery for the better part of a decade. What killed the romantic comedy? Did studios or audiences abandon the genre first? Did streaming television do it in—or just transform it into something new?
But while the rom-com’s