What Dane Cook movies do is drop all pretense of it being the woman’s desires to be with the hero, and makes the implicit rules ridiculous. I’d almost say that these movies deconstruct the “The Hero gets the Girl” cliche, excepts that it’s Dane Cook, and these are terrible movies.

An asteroid is headed towards earth, its course unalterable unless a crack team of professional miners goes up and plants explosives to break the mega-rock into miniature pieces that burn up in the atmosphere. But the only thing that can really save the earth is to send Dane Cook up to date-rape the asteroid, realize that no, he really does love it after all, and try to win it back, all before it leaves a Jupiter’s-big-red-dot-size crater where the United States once was. With Andy Dick as Mission Control, Carlos Mencia as the NASA Scientist, and Gary Busey as the President. Rated R for “Rip Your Eyes out of Your Fucking Skull Awesome!”

>”Jessica Simpson’s character is not a human being with thoughts and drives. She’s an automaton who reacts to external stimuli.”

You know what that made me think of? A 50 Cent video…
There’s a lot of sexually laden imagery aimed at men where the rules are that men are driven by their sexual needs and don’t need an excuse for wanting sex, because ‘boys will be boys’.
So in 50 Cent videos men are seen as the “automatons who react to external stimuli”, and women are seen as the autonomous individuals who can decide if they ‘turn down’ or ‘give in’.

So either:
a) Matthew Belinkie is right and men as well as women need a blank slate protagonist (in line with the passive nature of most culture consumption)
b) there is a deep desire in movie audiences towards inertia ;-)
c) popular culture is working as a laboratory on problematic issues like free will, responsability and out more base desires.

Or all of the above, of course.

I have only seen _Employee of the Month_, so it’s the only one here I can speak of. When watching it, I didn’t realize it was classified as a romantic comedy, though. Its focus wasn’t really on the guy’s desire to be with the girl, but the antics he pulled in his goal to beat his competition. He doesn’t really think about HER so much as the other man involved. I would classify it with _Office Space_ before _Must Love Dogs_.

To touch on what Mlwaski said, I too have noticed the trend for movies to be about a loser that gets the girl, even if he doesn’t really seem to deserve it. _Saving Silverman_ comes to mind, but again, I wouldn’t call THIS a romantic comedy, either, for it too focuses on antics and not the relationship.

I do think Apatow’s movies are romantic comedies, though. They spend a lot of time hashing out the dynamic and relationship between the main characters. And so perhaps in attempts to imitate, others make movies about loser men that want a woman they initially can’t have and get so focused on the trees that they don’t see the forest. As such, it is sort of leading to the death of romantic comedy. A slow, painful death.

anyway, the point is, dane cook really should not have stepped outside the realm of standup. (MAKE NO MISTAKE, viewers, i’m not so much a fan of that either, but it is light years better than any acting ‘career’ and has its moments.)