The Era of the Anti

In their 1980 song of the same name, the J. Geils Band sang, “Love stinks,” and boy, they weren’t kidding. In love, there are no guarantees. Infidelity, free-floating resentment, mutual loathing, garden-variety boredom: sometimes it seems there are more forces to drive couples apart than to hold them together. No wonder the romantic comedy, in which meant-to-be lovebirds find their way to a happy ending, is one of our most cherished genres. Sometimes, though, it feels good to look the beast of love-gone-wrong directly in the eye.

A recent spate of darkly glittering comedies give us the opportunity to do just that. Forget the summer of love; this has been the summer of our grumbling discontent. Welcome to the age of the anti-romantic comedy. In writer-director Michael Shanks’ horror-comedy