The Movies: What If, The Fault In Our Stars (500) Days Of Summer may have been one of the most delightfully fresh romantic comedies (with an emphasis on the latter part of the term) of recent years, but boy did it ruin the genre in the process. A story of boy meets girl that wasn't a love story, it challenged the effect movies have on our perceptions on romance and the idea of a typically "good" guy. Not the most original concept, but executed to perfection. Sadly its imitators haven't quite been able to live up to it. If you're going to state rather explicitly that your movie is set in the real world, then there needs to be at least some passing commitment to that concept. This year that went out the window, with calling a story truthful treated like an obligatory statement, as if a movie not being 100% accurate is a heinous crime. In What If, the "realistic" Daniel Radcliffe rom-com about a guy who falls in love with a girl in a relationship, the guy ends up getting the girl and although The Fault In Our Stars doesn't let idealism cure cancer, it does still give its characters a saccharinely unbelievable love story, with a kiss in the room where Anne Frank was captured by Nazi's getting a round of applause. It's been proven to work before, but with so little care in making this suggested realism justified, it's coming across as a needless cliché.
