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. He will need to be cut out from the cardboard. You may even wish to cut her out from the cardboard. (You need a lot of cardboard for this recipe.) At no point add believability — not a pinch; not a soupçon; not a hint — or it might look like you are actually trying, which won’t do at all.
Now, add the man. (You may need to buy cardboard in bulk.) He should be vacuous but cute. Add Justin Bartha from The Hangover. Stir the man and the woman over an entirely tepid heat until she miraculously softens towards the contrived love obstacle; that is, their age difference — she is 40; he is 25. You do not need to stir vigorously. Ideally, your stirring should be fairly listless, rather as if you might have better things to do. Still, keep at it until there is a kiss in the snow. You can tell when the mixture has reached the kiss in the snow stage as there will 1) be a kiss and 2) it will be in the snow. Don’t worry if the kiss in the snow takes a while to come. It will happen. It always does.
Meanwhile, bring the wondrously pathetic script to a simmer, then remove and substitute with poo, wee and vomit jokes. If you find you are all out of poo, wee and vomit jokes, they can be purchased from stupendouslyunfunnyromcomgags.com. In particular, you will need several stupendously unfunny gags involving noisy bowel movements. Look under ‘special offers’; order enough noisy bowel jokes and you might be able to get a child weeing into a plant for free.
Next, push the mixture through his clichéd Jewish parents, and then through her preposterously rude, ageist friends, and push hard, until the man and woman split. You will know when they have split because there will be a lot of boo-hooing, but a contrived obstacle to love is a contrived obstacle to love, and ultimately it must have its way. Ask anyone. Ask Delia. Now, put your feet up and leave for five years while he goes round the world in an absurd, Amex-style montage as she continues to bring up her nauseating children alongside one of those high-powered jobs that let you turn up whenever you fancy. Just before serving, don’t forget to reblend and dish up that happy ending, although not before joining all the dots with the pen. Serve immediately, along with a full-bodied wine of the type which, hopefully, will knock you out ten minutes in.
Next week: how to make a nut-free gangster thriller.
Comments