Thou Shalt Not Consider nineties cinema to be non fiction

If I have learnt anything during my stint at University so far three things are for certain:

Firstly; Lectures that commence before 11am are automatically non compulsory, Secondly; There seems to be a worrying number of people who appear to have confused the arcane combination of sweatpants and flip flops with good taste and Thirdly; If someone asks you over with the premise of “Watching a film” after 10pm it goes without saying that the DVD you were initially promised will never actually make it out of the case.

With these essential findings shared and your minds firmly boggled from trying to decipher why anyone would wear sweatpants with flip flops I feel I should let my rant commence; For it isn’t the inconveniently timed lectures or the halfwits in inappropriate footwear that are driving me to distraction this week, instead it is the sheer amount of films I have been conned out of.

Is the notion of romance so dead and the art of seduction so forgotten that men are honestly enlisting the likes of Bill Murray and Wes Anderson to help get us into their bedrooms or have my expectations of romance been seriously corrupted by the Rom Com boom of the nineties?

If the latter is the case, and a quick survey of my house mates revel that may very well be true then I am in little doubt that I am not alone in blaming Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks for my unrealistic expectations of men, a second survey of said house mates also confirms these suspicions as well as the suspicions that conducting a third survey during “Hollyoaks” would probably result in the silent treatment.

So if this is really the case and there really are a generation of women out there who are as delusional as I then shouldn’t films such as “Notting Hill” “10 Things I Hate About You” and “When Harry met Sally” or indeed just Hugh Grant himself come with a health warning?

Forget smoking, I firmly believe a DVD collection as optimistic as mine is more detrimental to my health than twenty a day ever could be.

However all this considered we really should have seen this coming; after years spent enduring the renowned Primary School playground wooing technique that was “The Dead Arm” it’s hardly surprising that Romance never made it past Year Six, the very year that the Highschool tradition of “the sleepover” introduced me to the men that would eventually ruin my dating career before it had even stared; Freddie prince Jr, Heath and Tom.

Because I’m fairly certain we never saw Joseph Fiennes giving Gwyneth Paltrow a dead arm in “Shakespeare in Love” and if I remember correctly Tom Hanks never emailed Meg Ryans at 3am in “You’ve Got Mail” under the pretence that you would at least get to watch Bill Murray in his quest for a leopard shark, so at what point did it seem a good idea not forewarn cinema going thirteen year old girls to prepare to have bruised arms and egos for the forcible future rather than a perm and the ability to produce effortlessly witty pillow talk on a whim?


Put down the boxsets and lower your standards accordingly ladies.