Even when done well, the romantic comedy is easy to pick on. They’re so earnest and full of clich?s and unrealistic fairy tale standards. Intelligent women have been taught that there should be a healthy serving of self-hatred with whatever enjoyment you might glean from a well-done makeover montage. You don’t have to look much further than the phrase “rom-com” (like chick-lit) to know that. The dismissive term seems to have been thrown at the genre to take it and its fans down a few pegs, as if to say, no no, silly girl, that’s not cinema or literature or even art.
This is the world we and Natalie, the heroine at the heart of “Isn’t It Romantic,” live in, where these addictively appealing and occasionally great films come our way that we have to relegate to guilty pleasures or couch with disclaimers. And it can get rather exhausting that the justification always has to come back to a comparison to Nora Ephron, the only purveyor of rom-coms who has undeniable crossover film snob appeal.
And that’s kind of the premise of “Isn’t It Romantic,” in which a rom-com hating woman played by Rebel Wilson bonks her head and ends up in one herself. It’s written by Katie Silberman (who wrote the great “Set It Up”), Erin Cardillo and rom-com veteran Dana Fox (“The Wedding Date,” “What Happens in Vegas”) and directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson.
Natalie is introduced as a young girl glued to the television in a run-down apartment where her mother is off to the side making an ice cream and boxed wine float. On the screen is a young Julia Roberts in a bubble bath in “Pretty Woman.” Natalie’s mother tells her not to expect anything like that out of life. They don’t and never will look like Roberts and so the fairy tale is out of the question. Pretty harsh, but her mom is right, “Pretty Woman,” unlike so many great romantic comedies, is actually evil.
