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Mindy Kaling once summed up how a reasonably intelligent person can totally lose herself in the pleasure of a romantic comedy: "I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world," she wrote in "Flick Chicks," published in The New Yorker and her book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? "For me, there is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fake-y razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it."
After watching the trailer for The Boss, we suspect we'll be adding Kristen Bell's Claire, the "asexual" single mom, to Kaling's list of implausible rom-com types (the klutz, the ethereal weirdo, etc.). Come to think of it, there are many, many more mythical creatures that we can list.
We put on our most cynical glasses to view the women in popular rom-coms, from the '90s through today, and came up with far too many reasons to believe these ladies exist off the screen. Mind you, this often has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the films. It all depends on how much the other elements of the movie have encouraged us to suspend our disbelief.
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