Isn't it so adorable and hilarious when super macho dudes, like the Green Bay Packers football team, embrace stereotypically female interests, such as watching "romantic comedies?" That is the thesis of this Wall Street Journal article, which honestly buries the lede: that not only do the Packers have terrible taste in romantic comedies, they don't even really know what a romantic comedy is.
"I love rom-coms, all of them, I’m a big rom-com guy,” guard Josh Sitton told the Journal. “‘How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days’ is a good one. ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ is a great, great movie.”
No.
At its core, a romantic comedy is a funny movie about love that goes awry in some way, but has a happy ending. Notting Hill? Rom-com. Love Actually? Totally a rom-com (and a favorite of bros!). Unfortunately, the Packers' operational definition of "romantic comedy" appears to be "a movie without explosions," or perhaps, "a movie with a woman in it." By that definition, The Human Centipede would be classified a rom-com, which FYI it is not.
Pitch Perfect, an abiding love for which unites the Packers team, is not a romantic comedy, it is a comedy with women in it. The Devil Wears Prada is a comedy about the difficulties of being a woman balancing your professional and personal lives, which doesn't sound very romantic to me.
Semantics aside, anyone with good taste is capable of discerning between a good and bad rom-com, and knows that a rom-com's worth is largely determined by its cast. You could make a movie about a cyclops brewing a love potion to manipulate a robot dinosaur into loving her, but as long as it starred Hugh Grant, it'd be a good rom-com. The same cannot be said for Kate Hudson vehicles. (Sorry, Kate. Love your athleisure line though!)
If any of the Green Bay Packers need other totems of ladyhood womansplained to them, hit me up. I'll be watching Bridget Jones' Diary (a rom-com).
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love and war
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