Initial Thoughts on Short Cuts

While I found the reading fairly entertaining throughout, I definitely had a few issues with it. At my most petty, I'm a stickler for how a piece is written; misspelled words, horrible grammar, and poor flow get to me. I did not find any misspellings, assuming the writers are not American ("adherence to a recognisible formula" and later uses of "analysed" and "maximise"). My favorite bit though, was about Sleepless in Seattle: "Tears are the result of both of these feelings and guarantee that, since she can be moved to tears by Sam's love, Annie merits its inheritance." Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I feel like you have to read this line forward then backward to understand.

Those things beside the point, what really irritated me was the complete tone of expertise on the genre (and life essentially) without nearly any supporting evidence. I have not seen Sleepless in Seattle, in fact, my preconceived notions of the film are likely different from any others because I know it by its re-imagined trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUPnZMxr08). I cannot believe, though, that merely tearing up about Sam's love will ever necessarily "merit its inheritance." They follow with no proof of this. In order to legitimize their claim of the romcom as being the "lowest of the low" in genres, they use a romantic comedy review book. Just because someone writes reviews of romantic comedies does not make them the end all and be all on the subject. I see it just as likely that the authors felt it necessary to fess up to some amount of illegitimacy in the romcom genre in order to escape outside ridicule for writing such a book at all. If nothing else, reviewers are out to make money like everyone else and belittling what you do often has the effect of disarming an audience (as the authors note about the genre itself), a happier reader will ultimately buy the book.