Romantic comedy

"Romance depends not just on desire and affection but also on isolation from the claims of everyday life. It is on this point that these romantic comedies come closest to fitting the usual definition of the prose romance—as distinguished from the novel—one of the features of which is a setting far removed from everyday life: the forest, the ocean, a desert island, and the like. And yet in the Hollywood comedies I am discussing, most of the action takes place well within everyday settings."

"Shakespeare, from his very first experiment in the genre, conceived of the love comedy—the romantic comedy—as of something typically Italian, and for this reason he favoured the choice of Italian names for the main characters and, at least in the earliest examples, of Italian locations for the action."

"Even though I enjoy Hollywood romantic comedies like Notting Hill, it’s like they wear galoshes compared to the sly wit of a movie like Autumn Tale. They stomp squishy-footed through their clockwork plots, while Rohmer elegantly seduces us with people who have all of the alarming unpredictability of life. There’s never a doubt that Julia Roberts will live happily ever after. But Magali, now: One wrong step, and she’s alone with her vines forever."

"Romantic comedy was reborn in the films of the 1930s and ’40s. The distinction between a romantic comedy and the modern sense of romance is apparent in a comparison of [Leo McCarey's Love Affair] (1939), which the director remade as An Affair to Remember (1957). Both of these films are unequivocally modern romances, while Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993), a film that pays extensive homage to An Affair to Remember, is clearly a romantic comedy."

"I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. …. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character."

"Today it’s no secret that movie studios release blockbuster action films to meet the higher energy levels of summer audiences, more intellectual fare for the winter months, and romantic comedies for spring. They don’t do it out of any sense of loyalty to our natural chronobiological rhythms, but because it’s good business."