The idea of a woman who refuses to sleep with another man until she knows he’s the one she’s going to marry because she read in a ladies’ magazine that you can’t get married after you’ve had 20 romantic partners and she’s had 19 is a perfectly reasonable and entirely unexciting premise for a romantic comedy. A bit of a snooze, really. (Incidentally, the first time I heard of this movie was in that New Yorker profile of Anna Faris. Did you read that? You should read that. It was good!) For one thing, as a premise, it’s really stuck between two eras, right? Like, the era where a woman can even HAVE 20 romantic partners, and an era where all a woman wants is to get married. But perhaps that’s where we’re at as a society. Wait, could it be that What’s Your Number? is actually a perfect depiction of modern femininity? JUST KIDDING! I will tell you this, though: Anna Faris is very good, and that supporting cast is VERY GOOD! Chris Pratt! Andy Samberg! Thomas Lennon! And I didn’t even realize how much I missed Martin Freeman until just now. Missed you so much, buddy. Welcome home.

Well, I will say the same thing I said when the How Do You Know trailer came out: “I actually like romantic comedies, the problem is just that to so many of them are terrible, but I hope this one is good!” (I didn’t say that here. I didn’t write about that trailer. I said that to a friend of mine. We talk in very complete sentences completely devoid of hesitation or colloquialism.) Well, we all know how THAT turned out. But today is a new day, and this is a new romantic comedy trailer. It could go either way! I like all the actors? The one thing that does bother me right out of the gate is the Hollywoodian insistence that divorce is a mistake. Like, a) not really, divorce actually saves a lot of people from being trapped in an unhappy life and is usually the end result of a long, miserable, and exhausting war of attrition, not some flippant choice made out of hand, and b) YOU BASICALLY INVENTED DIVORCE, HOLLYWOOD. It is specifically the idealized and wildly unrealistic romantic notion of what love SHOULD be generated by countless Hollywood depictions of pre-scripted, fantasy romance that has led so many people to find themselves dissatisfied and disillusioned with their own relationships, even when their own relationships might be very good relationships! And now Hollywood is going to constantly tell everyone that this, too, is getting it wrong? Hey, Hollywood, do people–other than the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, so do not say the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team–ever get it RIGHT? Asshole?

Eek. Maybe this can’t go either way…Apparently this trailer makes me very angry. I hate it. Don’t see it. Just kidding. Do whatever you want! THIS IS AMERICA!

LADIES! DON’T ALL RUSH THE MOVIE THEATER AT ONCE! Obviously, this looks great. Like, really really great. My only question is: HOW WILL IT END WHO WILL GET THE MANNNNN? Just kidding. Oof. I think my favorite part about these incessantly derivative romantic comedies is how hilariously bland all of the names are getting. It is always, like, Someone’s Here. Or: Give It A Minute. Or: Hands Off the Merchandise. I also like how it is always a woman’s most towering achievement to find the courage deep within herself to tell her selfish, overbearing nightmare of a friend “no” about some stupid thing. Congrats, ladies. You are doing great!

• Lifeless in Seattle
• Date Night of the Living Dead
• Four Funerals and a Wedding
• When Scary Met Sally
• Must Love Saws
• Nightmarry on Elm Street

Love means never having to say I’m WINNING!

Woof.

Obviously, movies should be able to tell the stories of characters with Asperger’s. They are as deserving of having their experiences committed to film as anything that Bruce Willis has ever been involved with. And in some sense I suppose romantic comedy is as good of a genre as any, and perhaps better than some (horror, psychological thriller, and porno, for example, would be worse). But there’s still something kind of icky about an otherwise by-the-book romantic comedy, that appears to have lifted the “quirky” character of Adam directly from the Wikipedia definition of the syndrome that defines him. The fact of the matter is that for as ridiculous and outlandish as other genres can get, romantic comedy perhaps more than any other, depends on the big hook to differentiate new films from all the painfully similar films that came before. And in this romantic comedy, that hook is a mild form of autism. Yuck.

Or maybe I just need to be more Kelly “Daymare” Bensimon about this.

“Oh, that’s cute.”

Better?

ABC is bringing the Jennifer Lopez starrer “Maid in Manhattan” to the small screen.

The network is in negotiations for a series adaptation of the 2002 romantic comedy to be written by Chad Hodge and executive produced by Lopez, Joe Roth and the film’s producer, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas.

But that movie stinks! Everyone knows that. Your mom has terrible taste in movies and she refused to see it. She just thought it looked too dumb. She went to see Two Weeks Notice instead. Now, I know that Hollywood wants to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drill for ideas, but surely there’s a better stop gap than this. I love romantic comedies (THIS IS A SECRET, DO NOT TELL PEOPLE) and I can easily think of 10 romantic comedies that would make better shows than Maid in Manhattan. And I have. After the jump, a list of the 10 romantic comedies that would make better TV shows than Maid in Manhattan.

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