5 Romantic Comedies All Guys Should Secretly Love

2. Wall-E

"In the distant future, a small waste collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind." Not the most traditional story line for a romantic comedy and, strictly speaking, it isn't a romantic comedy. It is funny though, and does have some genuinely romantic scenes - which is more than 99% of the movies in the genre possess. It's also filled with some terrific thinly veiled metaphors for sex.

Wall-E is a lonely little robot-come-cleaner whose daily routine involves waking up, cleaning up other people's mess, collecting little bits of rubbish to take home and then recharging himself overnight so that he can do the same thing the next day. Sound familiar?

Earth has been destroyed by the consumption of really fat humans, and they have all buggered off to live on a huge space ship. The space ship has countless cinemas, leisure facilities, fast food places - all of the things expected of a futuristic cruise liner. Wall-E's job is to clean up planet earth so that one day the fatties may come down and ruin it all again. The mission isn't going well, and no matter how much little Wall-E tries, he's simply moving all the rubbish from one place to another.

Eve, a "female" robot-come-egg, arrives to survey the planet on behalf of the space fatties and that's when Wall-E's little life changes for ever. He falls in love immediately and through a series of attempted kidnaps and borderline sleep molestations, realises that he must follow Eve up into space when she leaves.

He follows her, they fall in love, he gets excited and fires some white stuff out of a fire extinguisher in a scene of romance so robotic in nature that only Andy MacDowell when she doesn't realise it's raining can surpass it. They force the perfectly happy fat people to renounce their lazy, consumption driven lives and return to earth and find that there's hope for all of us in the end.

So why should guys secretly love this movie?

The message behind this film is a good one. It's about hope. Wall-E does the same, monotonous task all day, every day of his life. He has no direction, and is defined by his menial job. One day he is awoken from his daze by the sight of Eve, his saviour. He goes on to save the entire human race and enable them to renounce their current way of living in the hope that future generations may live on a more sustainable, caring and happy planet. The driving force behind this is love. The love he has for Eve, the love that she shows him and the ability of people to love one another. It's never too late to change, you CAN make a difference and everything will be better.

As nice as that message is, here's what I believe the true meaning to be. This one is slightly broader than previous, and perhaps a little nihilistic.

Consume. Eat what you want, when you want. Never ever leave you sofa unless absolutely necessary. Your actions have absolutely no consequences for you personally, and any negative impact as a result of your actions will be dealt with by someone else. Humans ruin the entire planet, do they die out? Of course not, they get to MOVE TO SPACE! In an age where people are becoming more and more obsessed by their appearance thanks to plastic surgery, air brushed adverts in magazines and on TV and young pop stars with entirely constructed lives with the aim of attaining mass appeal on a global scale, Wall-E presents an alternative world. A world where everybody is overweight and ugly, there's no need to even say the word "gym". You press a button and food appears in front of you, you press another button and you own new clothes. You need not concern yourself with the problems of the world, because there are none that you can see. It's a world in which we all become mollycoddled, dumb, overweight babies. A world where there is no cut throat society or a desperate race to the top, because why bother?

AND YOU GET TO LIVE IN SPACE!