I just do. Here’s his take on the sorry state of the romantic comedy:

“Our parents and grandparents had Rock Hudson and Doris Days — such delicious subtext! such amazing office furniture! — or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Or Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Or Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Or even, in ‘That Touch of Mink,’ Cary Grant and Doris Day. But you get the point. We have Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey.

“Who are perfectly charming. Don’t get me wrong. You remember them in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” don’t you? Neither do I, even if a search of this newspaper’s archives indicates that I saw it.”

It’s funny because it’s true. It’s also sad because it’s true.

We saw The Orphanage on Saturday, which was watchable enough up to a certain point, if totally familiar. What I really liked about it was that every actor in the movie, in addition to being very talented, looked like someone you might actually see in the grocery store or sit next to on the bus. It was a refreshing change. So basically it was kind of like The Others mixed with Dark Water.

(It doesn’t do me any credit, but one of the high points of the movie was when the obnoxious group of audience members fled at the first hint of a subtitle. I’d been dreading them as they complained about all those stairs you had to climb to get to their preferred seats, screamed at each other for Raisinettes, and laughed raucously at and quoted dialogue from the Meet the Spartans trailer. As soon as they realized they’d have to read the movie, they took off for another theatre, and everyone was happier.)

That night, we watched Knocked Up, and I can’t tell you how pleasantly surprised I was by it. I’m not even sure why I rented it in the first place, because I learned from bitter experience (Sideways) that unanimous critical praise for a movie dedicated to developmentally arrested heterosexual males doesn’t mean I’ll enjoy a single minute of it, but this was a treat. Now I’m going to have to put more Judd Apatow stuff in the queue.

I’d also developed a weird resistance to Katherine Heigl, mostly because she’s the designated It Girl of the moment, and bitter experience (Kate Hudson) has led me to distrust such coronations. But she’s really good, combining the qualities I find charming in Gwynneth Paltrow and Lisa Kudrow without either’s pitfalls. Leslie Mann was a total revelation, combining qualities I enjoy in several actresses who have no pitfalls (Madeline Kahn, Deborah Rush, and Rachael Harris) but bringing her own distinctive style to the mix. It seemed to take Seth Rogan a bit to find his footing, but I ended up liking him a lot too.

But what I particularly liked about the movie was that it dealt with character rather than tired gender constructs. It used some of those constructs but mostly just to undermine them, which was nice. Everyone got to be right about something, and their moments of wrongness weren’t inexcusably obnoxious. I’m not articulating this very well, so I’ll just quote A.O. Scott from The New York Times:

“‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’ and ‘Knocked Up’ are, primarily, movies about men, but Mr. Apatow is too smart, and too curious, to imprison the women in these films in the usual static roles of shrew, sexpot or sensible surrogate mom. Alison is not just Ben’s foil, and Mr. Apatow recognizes that her confusion and anxiety are, ultimately, far more acute and consequential than Ben’s. It’s her body and her future on the line, after all.”

The last movie we watched part of was The Invisible, which was crap. It’s about some obnoxious high-school kid who has to solve his own murder. It’s like a really long episode of The Ghost Whisperer but without any sympathetic characters, snappy dialogue, or endearing cheese. The movie did seem to have a big crush on Donnie Darko, though it didn’t result in anything worth watching.

I saw a couple of movies this weekend, both of which got a lift from weird girls.

The first was Hairspray, which wasn’t bad. Parts of it were an awful lot of fun, though I thought it peaked with the “Welcome to the Sixties” number in the middle. (It must be the closer for act one of the stage version, right?) Overall, it was a little too sincere and not weird enough for me.

Amanda Bynes as Penny was plenty weird, though, and I absolutely loved her. She was so sweetly out of it, and who wouldn’t fall in love with Elijah Kelley’s Seaweed? I mean, she clearly couldn’t be a worse dancer, and I’m glad the producers didn’t try and pretend otherwise, but I was really smitten with her on the whole.

The second movie I saw was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I thought was awful. None of the other movies have seen quite so much as a study guide for the novel. The script and the editing were really clumsy, and the pacing was so off. When you have to make your characters spout painfully expository dialogue to explain what’s going on to people who haven’t read the books, you should probably go back and do a couple of rewrites.

I did very much like Evanna Lynch as Luna. I like to think my fondness for the character would leave me with extremely high expectations of the actress playing the role, and I think she did extremely well. She had to spit out a lot of story morals, and I think she was surprisingly convincing.

So we went to see 28 Weeks Later today, having really enjoyed 28 Days Later. About halfway through, I stopped counting plot twists that came up because there wouldn’t have been any more movie if they hadn’t. What a disappointment.

On the bright side, the audience was quiet and well-behaved. And I found myself unexpectedly interested in the trailer for the Fantastic Four sequel, in spite of finding the first one incredibly boring.