Sometimes the difference between a joke working and a joke not working is a quick reaction shot or a couple of frames in the edit.
But on a micro level – directing comedy is super hard. So in a grand philosophical sense, I don’t think I did. I’m always trying to find the emotional truth of the scene, and I don’t think something is funny or moving unless it feels authentic. Did you have to adapt your directing style? I talked to Ahn while he was in New York doing a final edit of the film.įire Island is definitely more, um, rambunctious than your first two films. Streaming on Hulu/Disney+ starting in June, it’s a major studio release that, like its characters, doesn’t care what straight people think of it. “I knew I smelled some bottoms!” declares Cho’s character, Erin, when her gaggle of gays arrives to spend a week in her Fire Island beach home. While Ahn’s first two features, Spa Night and Driveways, could be described as artsy festival faves, Fire Island is a snappy carnival of gay friendship, eye candy and saucy commentary on modern queer life.
It’s also a fish-out-of-water story with a sassy band of brunch waiters dropped amid the monied (and mostly white) body fascists of New York gay society. Based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the obstacles to love are, well, pride and prejudice, particularly the human habits of self-doubt and misreading other people’s desires. In this gay holiday setting, there’s barely even a straight person to be shocked by the hilariously naughty dialogue (“Why would you say hello to someone you don’t want to fuck?”), the cruising through the Meat Rack or the dark-room mishaps. In Andrew Ahn’s Fire Island – a rom-com written by Joel Kim Booster, and starring Booster himself along with Bowen Yang, Conrad Ricamora, Matt Rogers and Margaret Cho – there is no homophobia in sight. Trick, a 1999 romp with Tori Spelling, Christian Campbell and John Paul Pitoc, is noteworthy because it broke this formula: the rom-com obstacle was simply the two guys finding a place to be alone together. Straight people’s falling-in-love was interrupted by careers or misunderstandings or an ex or whatever, but gay love was always “forbidden love.” The lead would meet a cute guy, but then they had to hide or abandon their love because nobody would ever accept it. Throw in Hugh Grant as a smarmy love-rat, Colin Firth as a bumbling gentleman and a script co-written by Richard Curtis, and you’ve got romcom royalty.“Okay, if there’s no dick in the movie, can I have as many butts as I want?”…īack in the 1990s, when gay cinema was starting to go mainstream, my friends and I would complain that what kept lovers apart in these films – the plot’s main engine – was always homophobia. Zellweger’s performance – British accent and all – is just highly believable her Bridget is one of us (although how an assistant at a publishing house can afford to live alone in a one-bedroom flat in London Bridge requires a little suspension of disbelief). That being said, it remains a charming and deeply relatable film, thanks mostly to double-Oscar-winner Renée Zellweger, who injects a lovable charm into her portrayal of the almost perennially unlucky-in-love Bridget. ‘Bridget Jones, wanton sex goddess, with a very bad man between her thighs…’īased on Helen Fielding’s newspaper-column-turned-bestselling-book about a loveable but perpetually single thirtysomething living in London, Bridget Jones’s Diary is very much a product of its time (hopefully today, we wouldn’t dare consider Bridget overweight or the fact that she’s single in her thirties a problem). ? The 100 best romantic films of all-time Written by Dave Calhoun, Cath Clarke, Tom Huddleston, Kate Lloyd, Andy Kryza, Phil de Semlyen, Alim Kheraj & Matthew Singer Love contains multitudes, and so do romantic comedies, and we considered it all when putting together this list of the best romcoms of all time. Others are light and airy, or borderline fantastical.
Others are dark and cynical, because, well, love often sucks. Some are sophisticated, drilling deep into the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Who hasn’t been in love, in one form or another? And honestly, what’s funnier than the things humans do while under love’s spell?īut the best romantic comedies don’t have to be straight-ahead farces to qualify – although, to be fair, many of them are. Frequently derided and dismissed as ‘chick flicks’, romcoms are, in truth, more broadly relatable than any other category of film.
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No movie genre is more misunderstood than romantic comedy.