Blog #7 (another late one, sorry :/)

Well for last weeks class meeting we were suppose to read Romantic Comedy Chapter 4 and also read from the Cultural Studies book. I wasn't able to show up for class on tuesday due to the two finals i was having on that day, so I had to study for them and unfortunately miss English. These were difficult finals but due to the sacrifice of the english class, I believe I was able to pass. I read the chapter from Romantic Comedy that would be dealt in the class discussion of that day, but i will talk about it here in a little bit. I would also like to explain my sudden disappearance from class on thursday. It all started in the morning when I was getting ready to go to school, when I went to take my daily pee I realized I had the curse! So I knew my day would be ruined. I made it through my lab class at 8:00 am but when I came to English class, I could feel the familiar monthly pains seeping through that just make me want to kill myself already (It really sucks to be a girl!) It was already almost 11:30 and I was sweating like a tortured pig, my head was about to burst and with all the power I could muster held in the churning vomit that was about to mess up the professors floor. The pain was unbearable, the pain in my abdomen area. I dislike leaving class in the middle of a lecture but my bladder couldn't hold it any longer so I went to relieve myself but I was still in unbearable pain I just couldn't hold in so I went back to class and left early, and for that I apologize. I appreciate that the professor isn't too difficult with piles of homework and assignments, so my absence from two class lectures is hopefully not a drastic hit on my grade.

Now for the Romantic Comedy! Chapter 4 was about the Neo-traditional Romantic Comedy genre, which adopt more conservative and traditional ending, where the couple in the end somehow reconcile just in time before the films end kind of like in the movie the Wedding Singer, where the girl is on a plane leaving with her fiancé to get married in Las Vegas but the guy goes to the airport and buys a plane ticket to Las Vegas in hopes of stopping the wedding, but what he doesn't know is that the girl is on the plane so he sings a song to her through the speakers and then walks in front of the girl and finishes the song for her. Her bad fiancé is locked into the toiletry and the two true lovers make up and end up together in the last scene of the movie. That's very lucky it would seem, and very unrealistic, but that's part of the Neo-traditional appeal. This genre gets it's references from romantic dramas, not the good old screwball or sex comedies of the past. The neo-traditional romantic comedy genre is the current dominant form of romantic comedy. The definition of the neo-traditional romcom is "it reasserts the old boy meets, loses, regains girl structure, emphasizing the couple will be heterosexual, will form a lasting relationship, and that their story will end as soon as they do so. Examples of the neo-traditional romcoms are Kate and Leopold, You've Got Mail, How to Lose a Guy in Ten days, and many more. Some characteristics of the neo-traditional romcoms are: a backlash against the ideologies of the radical film alongside a maintenance of it's visual surfaces, a mood of imprecise nostalgia, a more vague self-referentialism, and a de-emphasizing of sex. The setting of most of these neo-traditional romcoms are in the city, usually new york city to be exact. These popular films of modern times are not a advancement in the romantic comedy genre, but more of a step back, re-iterating the past views on love. But people like it so for now, this current form of Romantic comedy genre will retain its domination.