From Hollywood with love the rise and fall (and rise again) of the romantic comedy

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Summary

"From culture writer and GQ contributor Scott Meslow, an in-depth celebration of the romantic comedy's modern golden era and its role in our culture, tracking the genre from its heyday in the 80s and the 90s, its slow decline in the 2000s, and its explosive reemergence in the age of streaming, featuring exclusive interviews with the directors, writers, and stars of the iconic films that defined the genre"--

Contents

When Harry Met Sally...
Meg Ryan : America's sweetheart (until she wasn't)
Pretty Woman
Sandra Bullock : Miss Congeniality
Four Weddings And A Funeral
Hugh Grant : the hardest-working cad in Hollywood
Waiting To Exhale
Bill Pullman, Patrick Dempsey, et al : the other guys
My Best Friend's Wedding
Judy Greer : the best best friend
There's Something About Mary
Adam Sandler : the unlikely leading man
Bridget Jones's Diary
Drew Barrymore : the self-made superstar
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Jennifer Lopez : the triple threat
How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days
Reese Witherspoon : the prodigy
Love Actually
Will Smith : the rom-com hero we barely got
Something's Gotta Give
John Cusack : the reluctant romantic
Knocked Up
Kathleen Heigl : the apologist
Friends With Benefits
Ryan Reynolds and Dane Cook : two roads diverged
Untitled royal wedding comedy
Mindy Kaling : the scholar
Crazy Rich Asians
Henry Golding : new star in town
To All The Boys I've Loved Before
Conclusion.

Published Reviews

Booklist Review: "Meslow, an entertainment writer and film critic, dates the beginning of what he calls the modern romantic-comedy era to 1984, when director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron had lunch together. That led to When Harry Met Sally, which prompted a steady stream of modern rom-coms over the next 20-odd years, until a variety of factors, especially movie studios shifting their focus to "massive, franchise-generating blockbusters," sent the genre into a downward spiral. But fear not: the rom-com didn't really go away, and it certainly isn't dead. It's just different. The films, as Meslow argues convincingly, have followed on the Reiner-Ephron model to become hipper, more ethnically diverse, less dependent on centuries-old stories with modern-day trappings. Also, streaming services like Netflix now offer rom-coms a new home, so they aren't competing directly with the Hollywood blockbusters on the big screen. Meslow tells lots of engaging making-of stories (for example, how Pretty Woman was transformed from a fallen-woman tragedy into a Disney fairy tale), but it's his overarching theme, that romantic comedies are much more than lovey-dovey fluff, that really holds our interest."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review: "Journalist Meslow examines in his breezy debut the last 30 years of romantic comedy films, from 1989's When Harry Met Sally to 2018's To All the Boys I've Loved Before. A chapter on Pretty Woman reveals that it started out as a grittier drama entitled Three Thousand, while in a consideration of Hugh Grant, Meslow writes that the actor "hides the amount of work he puts into his performances under a thick layer of irony." My Big Fat Greek Wedding, meanwhile, was so successful upon its 2002 release because of how "natural and grounded" it was "in an era of rom-coms that were increasingly untethered from reality." Along the way, Meslow makes good points about a lack of diversity in the rom-com world but devotes little space to non-heterosexual film examples, and while the chapters are individually satisfying, they don't build to make a bigger case. Still, romance fans will find plenty to enjoy in this punchy retrospective. Agent: Noah Ballard, Curtis Brown. (Feb.)"
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Additional Information

Subjects	Romantic comedy films United States History and criticism Sociology Nonfiction Performing Arts Electronic books. Film criticism.
Publisher	[Place of publication not identified] :HarperCollins,2022 HarperCollins2022
Edition	First edition.
Contributors	OverDrive, Inc.
Language	English
System Details	Mode of access: World Wide Web. Format: Adobe EPUB eBook Format: Kindle Book Format: OverDrive Read Requires Adobe Digital Editions or Amazon Kindle
Description	1 online resource
Bibliography Notes	Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN	9780063026315 9780063026315
Other	Classic View