The 3 best rom-coms to watch this valentines day

Valentines day is here, but if your first love is cinema you might be wondering what movie to pick to celebrate the day. Let's face is, rom-coms are often the junk food of movies. And when one does pop up that manages to also explore themes on a relationship in an interesting way, they're often a little pessimistic (Annie Hall, for example).

So what movies help you celebrate love with good humour, but while exploring it with some moral integrity? Well, there are a few, and here is a list of my favs.

1. About Time

The men in his family have the ability to travel through time, and our protagonist wants to use it to get a girlfriend. But this is not just a 'get the girl' movie, it's about love, death and family... and spanning several years, it's about time. Not sci fit time, but out personal relationship to it.

This is Richard Curtis's (of Nothing Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Love Actually fame) most grounded and grown up movie. It has all of his trade marks, it's sweet and funny to his style that we've come to love. Upgrading Huge Hrant for the wonderful Domhall Gleeson. But this is clearly a movie made by a much more lived man. Even the beautiful American love interest that makes up all of his leading ladies, in this film has an actual personality. But you could also say that love too is finally given a personality. Love is the ultimate Mary Sue in romantic movies, but this movie celebrates it while dealing with it as a reality, something that can often be mundane, confusing, and hard to deal with, at times.

It'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry. A very sweet film, and in my opinion, a very romantic one too.

2. Friends With Kids

When two best friends realise kids ruin all their friends marriages, they start to envy divorced parents who can go and find their 'one' without all that pressure. It's then they realise, maybe they could co-parent together as friends.

This is When Harry Met Sally but updated to be both more true to life and more fun to watch. It manages to say a lot about relationships, in fact writer, director and star Jennifer Westfeldt is often referred to as the female Woody Allen. But I think of her more as Woody Allen for people who either get too bummed out watching his films, or just get sick of the lack of polish in the final product and want to watch a real 'movie'. Either way, I love her.

Great casting, no dull moments, and upbeat feel while dealing with real conflicts. This is a very underrated film.

3. Don Jon

Jon prides himself on being able to have one night stands with perfect 10s, but in secret, he can only really lose himself when he's watching porn. He desperately wants to find a girl who can fix this for him, and so sets his sights on a character played by Scarlett Johansson. After all, how could someone that sexy not be the solution?

It's not a perfect movie, so I get why it loses a few people, but I love it. It's got a lot going for it. We're a generation that try to use things in place of real intimacy and what feminist Joseph Gordon Levitt (writer, director and star) has to say about this is worth the ride. We start out in a fairly cartoonish world, which can at moments be pretty funny, or horrific depending on your sentiments. But as we follow Jon's journey in becoming more self aware, a more realistic aesthetic starts kicking in, and at this point if you're on-board with the message, you get some surprisingly beautiful moments.

Some honorary mentions 

Trainwreck was a huge rom-com this year. And I so wanted to love it. From the first scene, I was onboard. It was funny, it was fresh, it explored an interesting problem you don't often see explored... but then it lost me at the end. It was almost like writer and star Amy Schumer didn't know the answer to the problem she was looking at so just relied on rom-com tropes. A total departure to the rest of the movie. Still, I think a lot of people really enjoyed it, and my 'meh' about it has more to do with how good I know this film could have been.

Speaking of, I was very aware that I wasn't listing a Judd Apatow movie. I'm not too surprised, I think they do clever things to invite men into the rom com world, and they have some more interesting content, but they're also not very romantic. With the exception of Trainwreck they tend to just make relationships feel like a drag. If I was to mention one, This is 40 I think has the most valentines day appeal. Not because it's romantic, but because it's at least fair to both genders in how it mocks marriage, and you don't leave wishing they'd break up.  

Not all Woody Allen movies are a downer. There are some that are very sweet or even romantic, but I didn't list them because the reality is he's still actually pretty niche taste. Everyone Says I Love You has a lot of charm but, being a musical, is hard to recommend. Mighty Aphrodite is great fun and probably one of his best films, but want does it really say about romance when you get down to it?

No all, in all, I think the above three films are unusual in how they blend romance, comedy, and thinking into the perfect film for valentines day.


Meaning our winner is... About Time

Top 3 reasons why you needs to know structure

Structure 

noun

1. the arrangement of and relations between the parts or elements of something complex.

   
   

1. to give a story idea universal appeal 

Any wannabe screenwriter is confronted first and foremost with this difficulty: I need to be original and primal!

This is why it's useful to study story archetypes, because there are kinds of stories that everyone loves and have been around since the beginning of imagination. So when you fit your original ideas into an archetype, you're telling a story every one can connect to. You're familiarising the unfamiliar. In the same way, it tends to carry more weight to subvert archetypes if your dealing with very relatable ideas.

2. Structure reveals theme

I'd say this is _the_ reason to learn about structure. Once I realised this I realised what was truly beautiful and creative about it.

Take a movie like Se7en. SPOILERS. The movie ends with the line: "Ernest Hemingway once wrote that the world is a great place and worth fighting for, I agree with the second part." This is the theme of the movie. Put plainly the theme is about apathy. It's about how horrible the world is and about how in many ways it does warrant apathy, but the most horrible thing we can do is give into that apathy.

How the plot is told to the audience (the structure) has to be designed to show that theme. The movie can't just be about that because it says so, it has to take us on a ride from beginning to end that gets us to that conclusion. Plot is *structured* (there's that word again) in part by the demands of theme.

Say you played with Se7en's structure so that it wasn't made clear that the world is a horrible place until the end. The ending line, which seems to so beautifully state the theme, would now seem unearned. The end line demands that the arch in the movie for the MC is that he is at a point where he want to give up on the world, but through the events of the movie decides the world is worth fighting for, not because he learns it's actually a wonderful place, but through meeting his villain, a man who represents the extreme of the MC's disenchanted bitterness.

This in turn demands the need for a character like Brad Pitt's to go on the opposite journey (from hopeful to hopeless), so that all through out their two world views can be in argument (at times literally) so the movie can conclude with who's right.

The events in that movie aren't random or ordered just according to the whims of the filmmaker. Everything in how it's been put together and structured neatly gets us to that ending line. Being able to do that with structure sorts the men from the boys.

3. You need to learn about structure well, so you don't learn it badly

It's a phase many of us wannabes will go through. You read a bit of Syd Fields or Blake Synder and you think you have the short-cut formula for writing a movie. You follow every beat of their structure to the letter and you churn out your script according. There's only one problem, your script sucks.

Chances are you've made bad structural decisions about your movie because you haven't really been thinking creatively about how to craft your story through a structure, you just write it as to tick-off a list of plot points.

There are much deeper things to gather about structure than the quasi-statistical bullet point structure offered by writing gurus. But still these simple structures can get stuck in our head and actually limit the kinds of ideas we have about how to present our theme and story. There's only one way out of that trap, and that's to learn your way out.

Remember, structure just means:

1. the arrangement of and relations between the parts or elements of something complex.

Any time you write a movie, it might be that you have some cool bits and pieces--a good character, a fun scene, a nifty line--but you're also hoping you can put them together effectively so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When you go for the tragic scene, you want to have already set up that the audience cares about the injured character. When you start your movie, you want to manage expectations so the audience knows what to expect, while leaving enough curiosity to follow.

Which movie bits need which movie bits to support them is the majority of the job as a writer, and it's a learning curve. The professional script has it down. The amateur script has bits in the wrong order, so it's a bit confusing or boring, or has bits that aren't necessary for the story, or bits that are missing.

Structure solves problems to make a movie more emotionally engaging, more entertaining, and more clearly about what it's about.

Recommendation: Friends With Kids

Friends With Kids:

Every now and again there's a rom-com in the When Harry Met Sally ilk, which takes it's subject seriously. This is one of them. Two best friends decide to have a kid together realising two things: 1) their friend's with kids have horrible marriages and love and children just might not go together and 2) if they have a kid now, they can continue to date people without the pressure of finding 'the one' before their biological clocks run out.

Almost no one's heard of this movie, but it's one of the nicest written, more tasteful and intelligent rom-coms I've ever seen. Heck, it is the nicest. The main characters are engaging and you're welcomed readily into their lives. The humour is fun and continuous through out, but never slaughters the drama. But best of all is that it's very generous with it's theme, delving deep into the nature of marriage and settling down, and what constitutes a good or bad relationship. 

The Bizarre and Interesting Structure of Judd Apatow's 'Funny People'

Funny People is a Judd Aptow movie about two comedian 'friends' at opposite sides of the career ladder: one just starting out, and one who's peaked and has had as much success as one could have. I don't want to spoil the movie, so I'll try not to, but I will talk about how the movie bookends. If you think that'll spoil, don't continue.

Here's what interesting about this movie: It has a really weird structure, I'm not even sure if it works, but either way, I appreciate it trying something new.

But before getting into that, it's worth noting that this film really plays with some of your expectations. You might go in thinking it was a story about the underdog (the non-famous comedian) and his journey, and how this antagonistic mentor helps him while also creating hilarious situations. But the movie is actually darker than this. It's about comedy and it uses the language of comedy, but it isn't particularly a comedy itself. It's also not a sweet 'buddy movie'. Nor is it even a coming of age story about the young comedian. It's a dark story about the older comedian (played awesomely by Adam Sandler), and his dismal life and his inability to escape that dismal life because of how much he hates himself and acts like a jerk.

You might then have your expectations played with further as you're set up to think that X will be the challenge he rises to, which gets him out of his rut. "OK, no it's not," you then realise. "Y will be the challenge that he rises to that gets him out of his rut, then!" Again it isn't. It's seemingly a movie about a jerk, who you sense is underneath it all a really nice guy, but won't stop f**king himself over by being a jerk, who never gets past it....

...BUT for two tiny scenes at the beginning and the end of the movie, which bookend the film and reveal (as endings and beginnings so often do) what the film is really about. In the first he's a young comedian having what appears to be an incredibly fun time prank calling with his friends. At the end, he approaches the younger comedian with some jokes he's written for him.

Everything in between those two minutes, separated by nearly two hours, has nothing to do with his  dissatisfaction with comedy, or how he's let his love for the craft go, or how he wants to help the kid. It's about completely different problems in his life. But it happens that at the end of the movie, when you see him helping the young comedian, you realise what he needed all along was not any of the things he's spent the movie thinking he needs, he just needs to get back to where he was at the start of the movie when he himself was still young and loved making jokes with people.

It's very rare for a movie that would be about comedy and star Adam Sandler to be thematically so subtle, and play the theme so close to its chest with regards to the structure. I think ultimately all this contributes to why it doesn't work and people largely don't like the movie. But still, that's a very interesting, ballsy way for Aptow to go about getting the movie's closure.

I'm going to give it a break and say 7 out if 10 stars for trying something and being pretty enjoyable to watch.    

Fun with theme and genre: Buffy's existential musical

Buffy essayist Marguerite Krause (yes, there are Buffy essayists) describes the show as using monsters as thin symbolism for the shows true focus: relationships--romantic, platonic, and familial--and how to maintain or ruin them. The common themes in her opinion being: "failure to communicate, lack of trust, [and the] inability to envision or create a viable future".  

Buffy is an unusually good piece of existentialist fiction because, monsters or not, it's actually fairly grounded in what life is like. It just uses a lot of metaphors to get there. And actually one of the funnest metaphors it uses to get there, from a writing perceptive, is the musical episode. 

Easily the most famous existentialist (Nietzshian) slogan is "God is dead," meaning religion is no longer capable of providing spiritual guidance in the modern world. It also works as a great sum up of what existentialism is all about, i.e. the idea that individuals create the meanings in their world, rather than them being defined for them by a deity, authority or so on.

MINOR SPOILERS ('minor' cause, the show *ended* ten years ago, and though a bit of a twist, it's never really played off as one/I don't think takes away any enjoyment from the episodes). For Buffy, 'god is dead' is shown in its own metaphor  Having recently died by throwing herself into a portal, and having her bodyless soul be absorbed into a heaven-like reality, Buffy fails to come to terms with the pains of being alive again. Life's problems are persistent, enduring, at times tedious and end abruptly only in death. In the words of Krause, Buffy's 'inability to envision or create a viable future' leaves her apathetic, struggling to find a sense of purpose. 

The musical episode introduces a new metaphor: having something to sing about. The spell cast over the town reduces its peoples to sing and dance when emotions run high, and ends in human combustion if emotions run too high, sating the evil demon.

Having something to sing about in this case represents whether or not Buffy can find some sort of purpose, her big number being called 'Something to Sing about'. This is the fun thing. Ironically she has a lot to sing about, but it's about how she has nothing to sing about, and we the audience watch as she draws to the bitter-sweet conclusion that, though feeling disconnected from life, for exactly that reason she's the embodiment of what is to be alive.

This is nice genre writing because there's a fun juxtaposition here between the 'everything's alright in the end' world view of the musical and the more gritty, existentialist 'there's no grand plan for your life, nothing really matters' world view. Even the very bittersweet, Les Miserables (which is heavy on the bitter) is ultimately a musical at heart, and relies on a grand, romanisation of its tragedies. Not that that's a criticism of Les Mis, per sa. But it is cool to have a musical by BTVS, that is so about something real and inappropriate for a musical to deal with, and have it get away with it because of the brilliant way in which the musical is meta. Although its fun as a musical, it is ultimately about how life is not a musical. 

You Are Your Main Character

Today's thought:

A funny thing happens in our brains when we're writing our main character. We secretly, on some subconscious level, consent to casting ourselves in the part. They are us, it's our POV, our feelings, our life lessons, and our attitude. But somehow we end up holding back, we forget to include all our flaws and contradictions, and everything that makes us a real person. An interesting person. The MC ends up becoming a version of us, but without any of the life to it. Maybe because, again on that subconscious level, we know it's us, so we kind of want to hide the bad parts a little.

But in the spirit of art as therapy, I think there's probably a lot of value in just admitting there's at least part of you in your main character. And in the spirit of therapy as art, including some of those worst bits of you in there. As a practical exercise, what are your top three flaws, and how could you use them in your story? At the very least, drawing from your own flaws will help the down turns in the script feel more genuine and less contrived.

When to reveal your movie's theme?

The point at which your theme should be most obvious to the audience is the end of the movie. It's almost as if your movie intends to sculpt a question that will be answered by the time the paying customer leaves the theatre. Is you're movie sculpted this way?