The formulaic formula

The missus and I rented 27 Dresses, a movie that has been recommended, according to the wife, by almost all of her friends as a must see. So, after buying some chicken salad sandwich wedges from the local grocery store deli, we stopped by at the Redbox, checked it out, and plopped down in front of the telly and watched as we munched on our wares. Sexy, I know.

It's pretty formulaic, as in it copies the quintessential romantic/comedy - Jane Austen's immortal Pride and Prejudice. You have the heroine, fawning over one guy, hating the other. We begin with The Meeting, where the other guy (that she hates) and the heroine take turns clashing back and forth. This is accomplished by pointing out all of her ridiculous habits and flaws, usually something that is glaringly detrimental - workaholicism, no personality, passive-aggressive behavior, unable to say no, geeky, too outspoken, etc. This is then usually followed up with some shallow psychoanalysis where the guy pinpoints why the heroine acts this way, which gets the girl to hate him even more. But they start to get along after they spend more time together until finally, there is The Moment, where the girl totally connects with the guy she used to hate. They seem to be doing well, until you have The Misunderstanding, where the guy's previous decisions cascade into an avalanche that destroys the girl. She goes back to hatred, whereas the target of said hatred realizes he really does love this girl, despite his cynnical attitude towards love and runs back, issuing The Apology, and then nobly (if not forlornly) turns his back and walks out of her life. The girl then later has The Realization. This usually occurs when the first guy who the heroine was previously twitterpated for turns out to be either a) a jerk, or b) not what she was really looking for. Then the heroine realizes that oh my goodness, the guy she was once in love with was not who she thought he was all along, and the guy she hated at first was right all along about her and is - gasp!- The One! Then the rom/com leads up to The Chase Scene, as she runs through the city, looking for him and finally catches up in some public area where she issues The Confession and declares her love to the guy she once previously hated. There is then The Kiss, as everyone cheers should they be in a public area, and the Epilogue, where we get a cutsey scene about how absolutely happy and in love the couple is, generally with the heroine sighing that this was more than she ever dreamed life could be.

27 Dresses pretty much follows the basic formula like dogma. Most rom/coms do. We could pretty much predict the entire storyline from the very beginning. Dantzel even finished the final line - that Jane got more than she ever wished for when she finally gets married (because c'mon, we know she's going to get married at the end so it's not even a spoiler) - by verbatim in a wispy, breathy voice filled with mockery a good twenty seconds before the actress even said it.

The sad part is, the guy in general turns out to be somewhat abusive in a lot of these movies. They often start out jaded, cynnical, verbally abusive, inconsiderate of other peoples' feelings. The guy generally ends up this way because of The Heartbreak, when previously they got their ventricles stomped to pieces by some other wench. This is revealed during The Flashback, where the guy reveals his "soft side" to the heroine. Generally, alcohol is involved. These are guys I do not want my girls (when I have kids) to be dating, let alone marrying. Sure, they end up all "good" in the end, but change is hard, and sustaining change is even harder. The girl falls in love with him because he can usually disect her psychological behaviors in some way - a superficial claim that "he understands me." Also, most of the behaviors the guy exhibits, such as constantly calling, sending lots of gifts unwanted, following her around and surprising her at unexpected places, constantly belittling what he perceives as her silly actions and pointing out why the girl is really messed up in the head, stealing her planner and writing notes in it and returning it and so forth, would often get him a restraining order. But for a good 1.5 to 2 hours, a girl can forget that such behavior is actually really creepy and swoon over such acts of, well, romance, I think.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with a formulaic stereotype in fiction. After all, there's a reason why it's repeated so often - it works, right? Like women, we men have our action flicks, and like women, sometimes some guys I know feel they need to justify this guilty pleasure by pointing out how "deep" it is because it has some trite after school lesson about courage or justice or reality or honor or honesty or munitions. In the end, I guess the wifey and I were set up for the letdown that came after 27 Dresses. When people told us it was really good, we just didn't expect it to be so cookie cutter same.

Personally, I expected some explosions and an exposition about how courage isn't the absence of fear, but doing what you need to do despite of fear. I guess I should have watched Batman Begins instead.