Big Lie/Happily Ever After

Oh, romantic comedies....I admit, I've enjoyed a few, but I think they are on the bottom tier of American cinema. Many men would agree with that statement, while many women would disagree. Romantic comedies are so formulaic. I like to see something new when I see a movie. It's interesting how most rom-coms (or just regular romance movies) are about a white couple, so I guess that any movie with a non-white girlfriend/boyfriend automatically breaks the mold. But that's just a technicality. It can still have the usual generic plotline.
As I reviewed the Manatu reading, one part caught my eye: on page 12, it says, "films entertain and circulate ideas about our culture about people." There's always been the debate about whether movies mirror real life, or real life mirrors the movies. I think it's a little of both. As for the romance movies go, I'd say people expect real life to mirror the movies, but that is rarely the case. This often leads for high, unrealistic expectations and disappointments, especially for women. On many occasions I have watched movies with my girl friends, and they say, "Why can't real guys be like that?" I'm pretty sure it was in the Manatu reading that women learn about dating from romantic movies, and men learn about it from porn, or maybe I just heard that somewhere else. I'm sure some men watch porn and wish real women would be like that. But these are just fantasies, and people should recognize them as entertainment.
The Manatu reading also talked about the tendency for black men to date white women, but not vise versa. That's certainly the case for movie characters, but I don't think it's necessarily the case in real life. My grandparents once said they thought it was rarer for a black woman to date a white man, but I have personally known many black women to date white men. I think people often rely too much on statistics, or fictional representations, and these aren't always true to everyday life. That's why the "Big Lie" and "Happily Ever After" can be dangerous--romantic movies especially appeal to young girls, and those girls are very impressionable. Directors like Spike Lee claim they are depicting life as it truly is. I bet there are many stupid people out there who believe the movies show real life.