If I had to pick a sequence from a romantic comedy, I would choose Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher arguing at a coffee table in Harry and Sally. Years ago, I toured the Upper West Side in the pouring rain to immortalize myself in front of his house, then escaped to Café Luxembourg, where Kirby says a sentence that came to mind like cat hair: “Pesto is the quiche of the eighties .” “When I first saw it I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded so grown-up, like arguing over small furniture. Jess and Marie are the real heroes of the film. They like each other immediately. It takes Harry and Sally 12 years and three months to realize the obvious. You are not a role model. I’m sure they had a terrible divorce while Jess and Marie are still in love and playing Pictionary.
They say romantic comedies are dead, I doubt that. Once the pumpkins disappear from the windows, Antena 3 replaces its made-for-TV movies about murderous nannies with stories about executives finding love in snowy towns in Vermont. Gone are Lubitsch, La Cava and Ephron and their serve-and-volley dialogue, but not the need for vicarious romance. This is evidenced by the excessive attention that the relationship between Taylor Swift and the American football player Travis Kelce attracts in the USA. Supposedly serious media outlets analyze her body language and the NFL has made her its main attraction. An interest reciprocated by the public, not like Leonormania, which really begins and ends at kilometer zero in Madrid, like almost everything that feeds the national news. More serious media outlets are still trying to analyze this obsession. Don’t try to win the Pulitzer Prize with your research, the answer is simple: sometimes it’s nice to see happy people.
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