Generally after teaching a screenwriting class, I feel a sense of positive accomplishment, however meager.  Something's been learned, even if it's as trivial as the proper formatting of sound effects.  But after my last class, I felt like I was leaving a trail of fire and...

Peter Travers, a film critic for Rolling Stone magazine described He's Just Not That Into You as "a women-bashing tract disguised as a chick flick" and Kevin Maher has written in the Times that the "so-called chick flick has become home to the worst kind of regressive pre-feminist...

Every now and then life gets in the way.  I'd planned to see and write about another new movie, to do all the normal trivial things one does when one isn't paying particular attention to how precious and fleeting being alive is. But so much for plans.  My parents, visiting me her...

Interesting provenance for a project: the concept of He's Just Not That Into You came from a line in a 30-minute Sex and the City episode, which was then turned into a thin but nonetheless bestselling self-help book of the same title by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo.  So should it be a hu...

It's not for nothing that, according to charts on boxofficemojo.com, the second most popular (i.e. biggest moneymaking) romantic comedy of all time is called What Women Want, a movie which suggests that the answer may be: Mel Gibson.  (Another possible answer to this age-old query, most fa...

Practically everybody in print has been finding a way to speak to the great historical occasion of our 44th President's inauguration, and I was particularly taken with Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott's take in the NY Times: How the Movies Made the President.  Subtitled "Evolving Cin...

Sad to report, for our genre the year has ended with a whimper.  I fervently wish it wasn't the case, but sorry: Last Chance Harvey is a bust. Yes, of course -- you love Emma Thompson, and/or you love Dustin Hoffman?  Go.  Check your brain at the door, expect nothing more than ...

1995 - December 28, 2008 These dogs, by the way, in a famous painting by Andrea da Firenze, are depicted as guarding the gates to heaven so that only the righteous may pass.  (Vicki Hearne) She was one of those dogs - legendary in her own ever-widening circle of Those Who Love Molly people - t...

The Best in Romantic Comedy 2008 [Our Astas are named, of course, for the terrier film star who upstaged Cary Grant in such screwball classics as Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth.  Award winners from 2007 can be found here, 2006  here, and 2005 here.] Funny how this works: In 2007 I ...

Usually around mid-December, in preparation for the new year, Living RomCom does a "holiday link dump" -- a cybernetic closet-cleaning, where I list random links that have given me entertainment and insight in the past months, but have never found their way into a post. This year, when ant...