Starstruck: A giddy confection that helps rehabilitate the romcom TV review: Rose Matafeo’s new show is Notting Hill for Generation Instagram
about 3 hours ago
For proof that everything comes back into fashion eventually, look no further than the rehabilitation of the romcom. Once regarded as a soppy hellscape presided over by Richard Curtis and a pre-True Detective Matthew McConaughey, the genre is today on the up-and-up. That’s thanks to feelgood Netflix confections such as To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and to Palm Springs, aka Groundhog Day for millennials.
And thanks also, potentially, to
Starstruck (BBC One, Monday, 10.45pm), the New Zealand stand-up Rose Matafeo’s tilt at the milieu. Quirky and quippy, it’s essentially Curtis’s Notting Hill reimagined for Generation Instagram – or Normal People with warmth and wit replacing Marxism for Beginners.
I’m sorry I stabbed Vann Marsden in the eye. It’s terrible that his wife had to die in the aftermath. The fact that she was already ill and couldn’t take the strain doesn’t alter my sadness over her passing, but when a director takes all the movies you love and remakes them as stark, near silent catalogs of gestures, the critic has to respond.
One of the key roles of the cinema, I’d like you to understand, is to turn the atomized individual into part of a crowd, even while the viewer remains alone in the dark. The couple who comes to the theater seeking an evening entertainment say they’ve eaten at the Mexican restaurant down the street, talking idly over the chips and guacamole, bundling up their leftovers and shoving the leaking containers into the back seat of the car now give up sitting across from each other and sit next to each other, separated by an armrest, gazing forward. The monadic he and she, or he and he, or she and she, or whatever vessel the individual has
I’m sorry I stabbed Vann Marsden in the eye. It’s terrible that his wife had to die in the aftermath. The fact that she was already ill and couldn’t take the strain doesn’t alter my sadness over her passing, but when a director takes all the movies you love and remakes them as stark, near silent catalogs of gestures, the critic has to respond.
One of the key roles of the cinema, I’d like you to understand, is to turn the atomized individual into part of a crowd, even while the viewer remains alone in the dark. The couple who comes to the theater seeking an evening entertainment say they’ve eaten at the Mexican restaurant down the street, talking idly over the chips and guacamole, bundling up their leftovers and shoving the leaking containers into the back seat of the car now give up sitting across from each other and sit next to each other, separated by an armrest, gazing forward. The monadic he and she, or he and he, or she and she, or whatever vessel the individual has