The title of Wristcutters: A Love Story made me cringe, but the movie was pretty great. I’m going to say that anything with Tom Waits in it was great, though, so that’s not really an objective opinion.
The one thing that was less than fabulous about it was the “: A Love Story” part, because it starred the exact same uninspiring Indie Couple that Quirky Romances can’t seem to get away from. If you’re not familiar with it, Indie Couple is comprised of: Indie Girl – who pretends to be the opposite of your typical white-bread Hot Girl but is actually really just a white-bread Hot Girl with short hair and about a tablespoon of quirk, and Indie Boy, who is usually a dorkyish looking, socially inept 20something guy who lives a) with his parents, b) with his idiot friends or c) in a sad apartment alone, possibly after breaking up with his previous girlfriend, who was Hot but, we find out, way too Stereotypical and possibly Shallow for him. Indie Girl is at first much more put together and take-charge than Indie Boy, but she is slowly revealed to be the Hot Damsel in Distress, and Indie Boy finds himself at some point and, like, erupts from his social awkwardness to save her, as the awesome person that the audience knew he was.
Once you start looking for Indie Couple, you find them everywhere: Zack and Miri Make a Porno (and its sister film of the fun-loving-Seth-Rogen-gets-hot-
blonde genre, Knocked Up); Zach Braff with his dorky motorthing and Natalie Portman as Sam in Garden State, for whom IMDB actually uses the phrase “A blast of color, hope and quirks”; semi-sociopathic-but-only-in-cute-ways Amélie in Amélie and 
that shy photobooth guy she ends up with; Michael Cera and emotionally hair-dyeing Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World (also just Michael Cera in everything), to name a few. Wristcutters: A Love Story is one of the worst offenders, starring tired and burnt out looking Patrick Fugit and improbably-perfect-looking-for-a-stable-person-much-less-a-dead-drug-addict Shannyn Sossamon as thumb-sucking Mikal.
And yeah, fine, romance in art in general tends to get pretty archetypal. The basic plot of the romance hasn’t really changed…ever. Maybe there are only so many combinations of people who will fall in love the way we want to see it happen. But it’s not just that all indie romances seem to be eerily similar – it’s that indie movies just do it so dang self consciously, like they’re trying to prove that they are somehow extremely different from every romance ever written. “We’re not like other romances!” they’re yelling, “See how our actors are slightly less attractive than typical movie stars? See how our actresses have an offbeat fashion sense? See what we did there?”
Which is why the chemistry in Wristcutters and Scott Pilgrim and the like seems flat – self-consciousness just doesn’t work with romances, but it seems to be one of the main things that contemporary pop culture has inherited, and it’s proving a hard habit to break. So we get all these loves stories that nervously try to brush away the archetypes of romance, and that ignore the tradition of love stories in art since basically forever. And a romance that’s self-conscious about its romanticness isn’t going to do much else but collapse in on itself.
Culture War Reporters 