8. You'll Probably Never Meet Your Perfect Match
While nobody's going to watch Transformers and actually expect to get a pet robot for Christmas, the romance genre does tend to give people more false impressions than any other, given its rooting in recognisable situations, no matter how syrupy and trite they nevertheless might be. It's a genre that can't really win; if the romance melts the hearts of millions of lonely women like in The Notebook, then it's a fairytale that simply makes people miserable because scenarios like that really don't happen in real life, but if filmmakers opt for the gritty, authentic route, like in Blue Valentine, it becomes a depressing reminder of how complex relationship management is, and how you're probably not going to end up with "the one", but settle for someone else instead. Worse still, the film might make the mature assertion that people are complex and change throughout their lives. It's not exactly revelatory to suggest that there's someone far better matched to us than the person we end up with, but mainstream cinema, with its sugary love stories, is a potent reminder of the pure, almost idiotic level of love that's seldom achieved in real life, even if we do try to convince ourselves otherwise. Yes, you can tell it's not Valentine's Day anymore...