Knowing Exactly How It Ends

The worst school day of the year deserves to be forgotten as efficiently as possible, and nothing does that job like a romcom you’ve essentially already seen. I went with Becca, her sister, and her sister’s boyfriend to see Failure to Launch—Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker doing the thing where two people who are obviously going to end up together spend ninety minutes not ending up together yet.

I’m not really a romcom person, and yet I’ve somehow seen most of them in cinemas anyway. There’s something to that. You’re not there for surprise—you’re there for the reassurance that the shape holds, that the formula still works, that the story lands where it’s supposed to. Comfort food that happens to involve Sarah Jessica Parker. This one was funny enough. McConaughey is good at playing a man who doesn’t try very hard, which helps. Afterward we met up with Patricia and her friend, who’d been in the same multiplex watching a German kids’ football film, and we all ended up at McDonald’s. A decent way to bury a bad day.