Cooking up a rom-com

The Rebound
15, Nationwide

Here is my recipe for making your very own lame rom-com. It is a good recipe and a sound recipe but you will need to follow it to the letter — for example, never ever add fully rounded, believable characters — should you wish to make a film like The Rebound, as well as so many others. This recipe can serve an entire Odeon at one sitting and, astonishingly and depressingly, will probably even make money at the box office, even though the best accompaniments are boredom and ennui. 

Ingredients: A woman; a man; a few secondary characters (don’t worry too much about these. Simply buy some cardboard from Ryman or wherever and cut them out); a kiss in the snow; a contrived obstacle to love; dots; pen; a wondrously pathetic script; a happy ending. (However, do resist spending too much money on the ending, as the happiness doesn’t have to last beyond the final kiss. Primark does good happy endings that probably won’t last but are cheap enough not to matter, as does New Look.)

Method: First, take your woman, which may be Jennifer Aniston, or may be a more serious actress willing to coast and pull faces for a big bag of easy money (see Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated, Kate Winslet in The Holiday, and Catherine Zeta Jones in The Rebound). Toss in some kind of back story: toss in The Rebound’s back story. Make the woman a single parent who has moved to New York to start afresh after a divorce and escape an ex-husband so shallow and cruel and ridiculous no one in their right mind would have ever married him in the first place, assuming he could ever exist in the first place.