By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 13 years ago

The Feministing Rom Com Review: Valentine’s Day

For the last year, I’ve been watching and reviewing romantic comedies as a part of the Rom Com Review series. I’ve reviewed:

Our Family Wedding, Date Night, Going the Distance, How Do You Know, Just Wright, Killers, Life As We Know It, Morning Glory, She’s Out of My League, The Back-Up Plan and The Bounty Hunter.

That’s eleven rom coms in total.

But I missed one. The year is almost at an end, and some of you might have noticed that I failed to review the biggest rom com of the year. I failed to review Valentine’s Day. It is indeed true that I did not review Valentine’s Day, partly because the Rom Com Review series didn’t start until March.

As it turns out, it was pretty fortunate, though, that I didn’t watch Valentine’s Day until December, because it took nine months of building my strength and stamina and tolerance for rom coms to endure this movie. Had I tried to watch it without the requisite training, I might have been seriously injured. But this week, after almost a year of intensive rom com endurance training, I watched Valentine’s Day. And it was terrible.

So, let me make this review as short as I wish the movie had been. Valentine’s Day is a total freaking train wreck.

And that, to quote a movie that is definitely not a rom com, is all I have to say about that.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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