By Jeff Bergman, writer/director of Cup Half Empty
(from the 2008 Newport Beach Film Festival)
One morning a few years back, I woke up after spending the night with a girl for the first time. Not the first time ever, but the first time with this particular girl. She was already awake, and, as it was her apartment, I found her in the kitchen. She looked up at me as I entered.
"Hi," she said, with enough softness and sexuality to fill me with confidence and pride. "Want some coffee?"
Of course I did. And she proceeded to pour it into one of those travel mugs that you take with you in the car.
"You can bring it back the next time."
I thought we'd have brunch. And so began my reintroduction to dating life after moving to Los Angeles and ending a year's-long relationship.
While I knew, of course, that it's hard for men and women to communicate with each other, to know what the other wants, what I learned is the reason why. It's even harder to communicate with ourselves. What we think we want is often not what we really want, and trying to communicate that to the other person, is, well, a whole lot funnier when you're watching other people do it.
So that's romance. And sex, dating, relationships and the whole gamut of romantic interaction. The mating game is funny. It's also poignant and painful, maddening and touching, frustrating and exciting, and the most important activity most of us will ever engage in.
I know that romantic comedy as a genre gets a lot of hard knocks these days. If romance is funny and unpredictable, how come so many romantic comedies are neither? I don't really know. I'm just starting out. But I do know that the best ones are amazing. They leave the viewer saying, "Wow, life is just like that. And I laughed my ass off, too."
Maybe that experience can help us take ourselves a little less seriously and understand each other a little bit more. If we can do that, it would go a long way toward solving a lot of problems. I hope that I've made a small start with this film. And if you watch my film and say to yourself, "Wow, life is just like that," I shouldn't be that hard to find. Maybe in the tradition of Annie and Alvy, Holden and Alyssa, Joel and Clementine, we can have a brief, intense and ultimately doomed romance that everyone else but us knew should have worked out just fine.
Photo courtesy of the filmmaker. Cup Half Empty screens at the 2008 Newport Beach Film Festival (click for time and tickets). Festival run April 24-May 1. |
