The Rom-Com Poll

July 23, 2009 at 9:01 am (movies, romantic comedies)

brick-heartSometimes the best way to discern how real people feel about a topic is simply to ask.  I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a definitive list of “classic” or “must-see” romantic comedies, but nothing really jumped out at me as authentic.  So, I posed the question to my lovely facebook and twitter friends: What’s your favorite romantic comedy?

What I learned is that a lot of people like a lot of different romantic comedies, some critically hailed and others critically panned.  Out of 39 movies named, only nine received multiple votes, though Love Actually emerged as the runaway leader.  Here the movies and the number of votes they received.

I was surprised that 50 First Dates, which I’d always thought was underappreciated, got as many votes as it did. wood-heartPerhaps it’s becoming less so.  I think there are also a lot of movies out there that people don’t think of as romantic comedies.  Elizabethtown, for instance, most definitely has both comedy and romance, but I don’t generally think of it as a romantic comedy.  Same for The Princess Bride.  More than a few people balked at the genre as a whole, but I’d wager they’re keeping a rather narrow view of what could be classified as a romantic comedy.

With this diverse a crowd of movies, I wonder if there’s any romantic comedy out there that everyone hates.  After all, the movies that touch us in any genre, from what I can tell anyway, seem to be the ones that feel like we’ve walked some aspect of them ourselves.  To paraphrase Cameron Crowe, if you’ve written something that speaks to you, it probably speaks to others — at least some of them — too.

Thanks to everyone (especially the reluctant ones) for playing along!

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