Falling Out of Love with Romantic Comedies

The movie calendar is weird. The summer blockbuster season begins the first week in May (this year: Wolverine), reaches its twin peaks the weeks of Memorial Day and July 4, then gradually subsides. We're still in midsummer, yet there's only one ginormous action adventure (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) awaiting release, and not a cartoon hero or a dinosaur — or a cartoon dinosaur — in sight. Suddenly it's the time of real people learning how to cope with recognizable problems. The Hollywood kind of problems — the ones that can be solved in under two hours. (See the 100 best movies of all time.)

Mind you, there's nothing intellectually strenuous in the late-summer offerings. These are quirky romantic comedies in which dissonant figures struggle to achieve harmonic convergence. They take their cues from a pair of summer releases 20 years ago: When Harry Met Sally, which described a friendship that was sometimes a courtship, and sex, lies, and videotape, in which a man's impotence was the spur to romance. (Read TIME's 1989 review of When Harry Met Sally.)

Since then, eccentricity has become the norm. The characters might be two people who hate each other and thus are bound to fall in love, as in The Ugly Truth, or strangers with complementary needs, as in The Answer Man, or, for a change, folks who seem simpatico but have trouble becoming a couple, as in (500) Days of Summer. What the new films share is an aim to evoke familiar laughs and perhaps a climactic tear. That's the difference between an action movie and a comedy: the first makes you gasp, "I've never seen that before!"; the second has you nodding, saying "Hey, that's me."

Worst first. In The Ugly Truth, directed by Robert Luketic, Abby (Katherine Heigl) is the producer of a Sacramento, Calif., TV-news show whose ratings skyrocket when Mike (Gerard Butler), a macho man with a Cro-Magnon spin on dating, joins the team. Desperate to get a man — any man but Mike — Abby takes his advice on landing the hunky surgeon (Eric Winter) who lives next door. Mike will play a burly Cyrano to the doctor's winsome Roxane, until Abby realizes that Mr. Wrong is right for her.

Love's Labour's Lost
From the get-go, the movie is all ugly, no truth. Mike might be a little rough-edged, but Abby is a control freak, bossing everyone from underlings to blind dates. Something is very wrong when the beast is instantly more endearing than the beauty, and when a movie written by three women (two of whom did the very entertaining Legally Blonde, also directed by Luketic) becomes an unplanned essay in misogyny. Then again, everything goes awry here. A restaurant scene with Abby wearing vibrating underpants (a gloss on Meg Ryan's fake orgasm in When Harry Met Sally) is an embarrassment; the R-rated jokes earn only smirks; even the obligatory falling-in-love dance number gets botched. Blame Heigl, who's also an executive producer of the film. After Knocked Up and 27 Dresses she seemed primed to be the new Sandra Bullock, but this debacle makes Bullock's lame The Proposal shine like a screwball-comedy gem.

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