Critics and audiences have long been desperate: Where have all the romantic comedies gone? The light-hearted effervescence of past Harrys and Sallys and Bridget Joneses; the luminous, ambitious luster of a Nancy Meyers production (her latest production was shut down by Netflix in March when it reportedly surpassed the $130 million mark in price.)
What modern viewers tend to see instead are pale, painstaking imitations — Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel’s frenetic caper “Shotgun Wedding,” Ana de Armas and Chris Evans’ hollow-core vehicle “Ghosted.” In projects like these, romance is an empty gesture; Chemistry, a distant dream. (“Your Place or Mine,” a long-distance dry love kiss released earlier this year, literally couldn’t bear to keep Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher physically in the same frame for more than three scenes.)
Moviegoers craved something unashamedly adult, and God willing, God willing, it will be really fun. He’ll probably have better luck reviving another ailing genre this summer if he finds it: romantic comedy’s sexier cousin, sex comedy. However, what Hard-R shenanigans will look like in 2023 – post #MeToo, post the pandemic, in the midst of the online culture war – is bound to be very different than it was in 1993 or even 2013.
In a landscape so dominated by bloated blockbusters and soul-crushing sequels, it’s a little depressing to acknowledge that a new perspective can be signaled through something as simple and radical as the female lens. Still, it’s something new to see Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence signing on for a lewd movie like No Hard Feelings, out June 23. She plays a financially troubled Uber driver who agrees, for a fee, to seduce the clumsy teenage son of a wealthy New York couple. The Red Band trailer surpassed 45 million views in its first 24 hours online – perhaps a testament to moviegoers’ all too long-unsatisfied appetite for light-hearted slapstick bits and “Can I touch your wiener?” jokes.
The similarly expansive “Joy Ride,” a sort of sunny “hangover” redux starring and created by Asian-American women, met with near-universal acclaim when it premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March. (It’s slated for release July 7.) Over 95 extravagantly off-kilter minutes, Emily in Paris’ Ashley Park and Everything Everywhere All at Once star Stephanie Hsu lead an easygoing foursome on a trip to China of friendship and self-confidence. Discovery breaking dozens of Class A drug and public indecency laws.
Introducing the same week at SXSW, seedy, low-budget Bottoms (in theaters August 25) was hailed as a queer Gen Z twist on the classic high school virginity story. Directed by Emma Seligman (“Shiva Baby”), the film stars “Shiva” star Rachel Sennott and “The Bear” star Ayo Edebiri as teenage lesbians who form a fight club to woo the cheerleaders of their dreams. It comes to hickeys and hematomas.
The sex they all bring to screen is crazy and messy and at times medically questionable. It also focuses uncompromisingly on female desire and pleasure of all kinds – “I’ll have what she has” to the umpteenth degree. When these films succeed, they join the shortlist of equal-opportunity ranches in the multiplex: touchstones for misbehaving women, like 2011’s scatological beacon “Bridesmaids,” the Amy Schumer hit 2015’s “Trainwreck” and 2017’s rowdy ensemble “Girls Trip,” which turned Tiffany Haddish into an overnight grapefruit-felling meme. (Consider “Easy A” (2010) starring a scarlet Emma Stone as a PG-13 starter set.) These, however, all had male and often middle-aged directors; Even rarer are those that are actually supervised by women, such as Kay Unger’s “Blockers” and Olivia Wilde’s “Booksmart”.
As such, some of the demographic shifts seem to stand out: Joy Ride is the directorial debut of Malaysian-American screenwriter Adele Lim, who also co-wrote Crazy Rich Asians, and is scripted by Family Guy alumnus Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsaio. Most of the actors on either side of the camera in “Bottoms” — which alternates loosely between references to Bell Hooks and mid-eight Avril Lavigne — were born after the first Clinton administration.
But of course, the public hardly measures their free time in real diversity. Battered by Covid, terrified by a faltering economy and eventually perhaps chilled on endless Marvel tent poles, their only instruction seems to be: Entertain me. Given the option of heady but esoteric awards shows like “Tár” and “Women Talking,” in which a classical music conductor falls into self-imposed shame and Mennonite women debate rape in a barn, they’ve instead flocked to light-heartedly ridiculous undercards like “M3gan” and “Cocaine Bear”. (The latter shares two of his three producers with “Bottoms.”)
But even Viennese jokes bear the burden of history. Seth Rogen, whose career began in the animal house that Judd Apatow built and is credited with producing Joy Ride, has admitted in numerous interviews that much of his catalog doesn’t stand up to today’s scrutiny. A cursory iteration of classics like Porky’s, American Pie, and most of the films in the expanded Apatow universe (Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad) evoke moments of tongue-in-cheek misogyny. occasional racism and not-so-latent homophobia that now seem like obvious third rails.
How Hollywood can adapt at a time when identity and isms are so conscious — and when a generation of young people are reportedly having significantly less sex than their predecessors — feels like an ongoing social experiment, as unclear as that Future of film itself. After all, the gift of the most obnoxious comedies is that they allow us to leave good manners and safe spaces outside in a darkened room for an hour or two. At a press preview in April, co-stars Sydney Sweeney and Glenn Powell proudly sold their upcoming Anyone But You, a modern take on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, due out in December from Easy A director Will Gluck . as a combative romance between “a real nightmare” and an ass, with no small amount of nudity. The internet swooned.
However, those who fit a certain archetype, like Powell and Sweeney, will of course have more leeway than others to push the boundaries of mainstream taste. Projects that showcase more traditionally underrepresented groups—or, for that matter, anyone who falls into the “not straight, not thin, not white” category—are still often designed to carry the full weight of representation. Watch the performative hand-wringing over last year’s box office failure of “Bros,” a well-reviewed R-rated gay romantic comedy with an underdog cast, after being breathlessly touted as the first film of its kind to receive major theatrical release.
Perhaps for all of these reasons there are no teachable moments explicitly embedded in the insane, raging teenage life of “Bottoms,” even as certain life lessons smuggle in off the fringes. Or in “Joy Ride”, in which one main character is still searching for her Chinese birth parents, another is non-binary and two others treat sex like some kind of global all-you-can-eat buffet. Here the medium is the message; The rest is as evil – and ultimately messy, tender, and yes, happy – as they choose to be.