The name’s Duncan. You know, the D. V. Detective.  Things have been pretty good… except when a mix up in inventory labels separates me from owning my new cell phone. Who’s running that store? Laurel and Hardy? The Three Stooges? Wall Street bankers? I shouldn’t worry, though. I have a phone that still works – too bad I gotta go home to use it. The wiring in this building has gotten so bad that now when I turn on the light, my air conditioner goes off. What good is it to be cold, in the dark, in late September? It’s pointless to whine about it. I can’t buy the damn phone now anyway. Thanks to my unreliable credit card. Over limit charge? What was I supposed to do, not pay for the plunger? The line at Duane Reade was way too long for me to step off, go home, get the five dollars I forgot to bring seconds after finding my toilet overflowing. I had to get it fixed ASAP. Better move onto the reason why you all came to this site in the first place. How ‘bout I tell you how I got two paychecks from one case? It’s the one I call: The Case of the Frustrated Romantic.

The way she walked into the room, it… didn’t do anything for me. I wasn’t sure how to describe how a woman sprints into an office and expect to be properly ogled. She talked as if she was paying me by the minute. In between her nervous chatter, I happened to pick up her name: Sharon Dexter. Her word count stumbled when I threw out a Devil Wears Prada reference. Sharon wagged her finger at me like an off-duty subway toll booth clerk and said that was the extent of her problem. She needed viable research focusing on the difference between male and female centric romantic comedies for an upcoming lecture. Either she met her 36-hour deadline or her promotion would hang precariously like my patience with the crap that’s been happening to me lately. She offered to pay me for the research along with my usual fee. I would’ve settled for the fee, but I needed the extra dough for that extra over limit fee.

As I was walking home, I wondered what the hell was I going to do. I’m not the most objective person when it comes to chick flicks. How do I report what I think without coming off as if dissing the Sex and the City movie was part of my male rites of passage? I wasn’t sure if it was the constant car honks or the smell from infinite amount of exhaust pipes, but I managed to conjure up two movies I can compare and contrast the male and female psyches. Okay. Alright. The idea came from a half-ripped Grey’s Anatomy poster on some scaffolding. Katherine Heigl’s face nearly survived the onslaught of overzealous street promoters. She starred in two notable romantic comedies. One male centered Knocked Up, the other female centered, 27 Dresses.

I reached my apartment, grabbed a beer from the fridge then spent the night watching people spill their feelings like horror victims spill their guts. Afterwards, I opened my laptop and typed the following:

Ben: Are you shocked people bought that I knocked you up? Allison: More so.

Male and female centric rom-coms can be summed up like this: In 27 Dresses, Jane (Katherine Heigl) sets out, I mean, pines for her boss, for love. In Knocked Up, Ben (Seth Rogan) finds love because he has no choice. But let’s get under the unisex shirt for a moment. These two flicks have surprising similaries as well as glaring differences.

Since romantic comedies are modern fairy tales for women, Knocked Up is the contemporary wet dream for men. That’s the only way I can explain why a woman who snagged an on-air gig on a celebrity cable channel slept with a slacker like Ben hours later. It almost made Dudley Moore’s romp with Bo Derek in 10 believable. Look, the male fantasy is as old as my pick-up lines. My question is why was Allison not turned off by Ben and his friends before she got drunk?  I guess the movie wanted to convince the audience that she was nice and not one of those social climbing, golddigging types who happen to sport a beautiful face. Does that mean she should’ve ignored Ben? No. The talking, the dancing, the drinking, I’ll buy. The sex… not so much.  Could it have happened? Yeah. So could skinny dipping at minus ten degrees. However, if women can hang long enough after Allison told Ben that she’s pregnant, they’ll warm up to the flick.

On the other side of wishful thinking, 27 Dresses featured Jane, a woman who didn’t have it in her to say no to the point of spending a lifetime wearing ugly bridesmaid dresses. The one upside to this flick: James Marsden finally gets the girl! He passed “the perfect guy, but not perfect for the main girl” role to Edward Burns. Here’s the number one reason why chick flicks lost favor even among chicks: moviegoers turn into psychics. In fact, if Vegas bet on these plot points, the whole industry would go out of business. Case in point, the movie began showing how Jane caught the wedding dress bug at the tender age of 8. She saved her Aunt’s wedding by helping the aunt make her dress look perfect. Yet, it’s not enough for us to see it, grown-up Jane had to narrate just in case viewers couldn’t get what was going on.

But in closer examination, are these movies really that different? Both films wasted much screen time persuading the paying public how each protagonist had faults. The major contrast was in how those faults were expressed. Knocked Up explored in several ways how clueless Ben was to Allison. Whereas 27 Dresses Whereas 27 Dresses showed how clueless Jane was to herself. That’s the underlying theme, isn’t it? Men are jerks to women and women are jerks to themselves.

Hi, I’m James Marden. Just so you know, your’re not allowed to dump me for someone else.

Then we’ve got the scenes where its necessary to build evidence to justify how the chosen couples bonded as smoothly as soap slipping down a shower curtain. For Knocked Up, the couple went to doctor’s appointments, shopping at baby stores, Ben inviting Allison to his place to meet his friends then they had more sex. In 27 Dresses, Jane and Kevin registered items in an upscale store, they laugh and act goofy during a montage of Jane wearing each dress at her apartment, they sing and dance after getting drunk in a bar, and they have sex in the back of Jane’s car. The huge zit on the nose difference was when these couples got horizontal. This, again, represented the general attitudes between the worlds of Venus and Mars. For men, sex before bonding (Knocked Up). For women, bonding before sex (27 Dresses).

Another similar, but different instance was how the protagonists licked their wounds after the major bombshell that broke them up for good… until the climax of the third Act. In 27 Dresses, Jane sulked in her apartment as her Bridezilla sister, Tess, berated her after Kevin put Jane’s hobby on blast in the front page of the New York Journal. In Knocked Up, Ben needed his boys to help enjoy lap dances in a strip club after Allison kicked him out of her car, in the middle of the street, when he showed no sympathy for her sister.
Going even deeper, these films weren’t that different, after all. Both Ben and Jane slept with their love interests, both realized they had to change in order to keep their relationships and both women in these films found their “Mr. Wrong” was right for them before the credits rolled. In other words, Knocked Up and 27 Dresses were deceptively traditional. A guy knocked up a girl and through the advice of his father took responsibility for the result of his one night stand. A girl took off her rose colored glasses, grew a spine and got married in her own, tailor made Bridal gown.

Ben: How cute do I look? Allison: Enough to convince people we are actually sharing a meaningful moment

The real difference was the tone. Knocked Up is the millennium update of the Kevin Smith 90s slacker movies. But even this comparison isn’t quite right. Clerks, Dogma, and Chasing Amy were more experimental. Yes, Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith featured slackers, abrasive language, and Star Wars trivia. But the subjects these writers/directors grappled with were as distant as the coasts in which their characters reside. While Knocked Up had people smoking weed, Clerks had two characters selling weed. As Ben and his friends watched two women kissing, Randell watched hermaphrodite porn while Caitlin unknowingly had sex with a dead guy. But the weird thing is, other than what I just mentioned, Smith’s films can arguably be more palatable to women because of one thing: dialogue. It’s the Cyrano de Bergerac rule of attraction: It doesn’t matter how you look, it’s what you say that gets you laid. Throw in some poignant insights from the most unlikeliest of characters (two drug dealing do gooders come to mind), and women are as drawn as some are to death row inmates.

Getting back to the major point, if movie goers peel back the vulgar veneer, they’d find a tame storyline. Ben did what those Clerks guys couldn’t do, find a good paying job, move out to a nice apartment and start family life. The one night stand was the springboard for Ben to join the rest of normal society.

Was this made for Little Bo Peep or The Wizard of Oz?

27 Dresses tone was as transparent as Sports Illustrated publishing a swimsuit issue. What drives men to desert a movie like this for an extended “bathroom break” is the naked desire of marriage being hammered from the get-go. Knowing this, the film neatly packed this sentiment inside Kevin, Jane’s Mr. Right disguised as Mr. Wrong. His job was to jar Jane out of her delusions like Cher did for Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck. However, Kevin restrained himself to just hurling snarky banter to try and cause sexual tension. Another annoying habit with most female driven stories is having their protagonists feel sorry for themselves. When Jane unleashed how “compatible” her sister Tess was with George (Jane’s boss and crush) during the engagement party, Jane’s best friend, Casey, convinced her to feel bad for finally standing up to the spoiled brat. This was the best scene in the movie and it was ruined. As Jane spoke the words Tess wanted her to say, she let the slide show pictures tell the real story. And in the scene most likely to win the “been there, done that” award was Jane’s tension-filled race to catch up to her one true love before he’s gone forever. Professing that love in front of a bunch of strangers and heighten her embarrassment if Kevin rejected her came in at a close second.

Allison: Check it again. Sister: I did. 5 times. Hey, you’re the one who wanted to be in this flick.

The substantive similarities between Knocked Up27 Dresses smother the surface differences like tangy A-1 sauce smothers a brunt piece of steak. They both feature nice, career oriented women who need to loosen up. Yet, it’s the female oriented flick that presented the woman as a push over, go figure. Both movies settled into romantic conventions; they only detoured in tone and points-of-view to get to the same result: starting life with the person they love.

The proofreading and spell checking took only a few minutes then I emailed Sharon.

The next day, the reward for using my brain cells was left on my desk. The woman who sent it was busy fine tuning her lecture. In a way of showing her gratitude, Sharon invited me to see her rattle off my research. I scrambled for an excuse until she mentioned the disproportionate amount of women who will be in attendance. Now that The Case of The Frustrated Romantic is done, I gotta go hop on the subway. It’s not everyday to hear my work and see women’s reactions ripple through the audience.

Thanks for visiting, everybody. Come back next time. Oh, gotta speed this up, I’m gonna be late. I’m Devin V. Duncan, the D.V. Detective, logging off.