"He may not have a girlfriend, but he certainly likes girls -- he's even, in some cases, a hetero blade, scoring with tourists or love-hungry single mothers. But if he does have a girlfriend she works hard. Usually, she's the same age as he is but seems older, as if the disparity between boys and girls in ninth grade had been recapitulated fifteen years later. She dresses in Donna Karan or Ralph Lauren or the like; she's a corporate executive, or a lawyer, or works in TV, public relations, or an art gallery. She's good-tempered, honest, great-looking, and serious. She wants to 'get to the next stage of life' -- settle down, marry, maybe have children. Apart from getting on with it, however, she doesn't have an idea in her head, and she's not the one who makes the jokes.
...
There they are, the young man and young woman of the dominant romantic-comedy trend of the past several years -- the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow. The movies form a genre of sorts: the slacker-striver romance."
-David Denby, The New Yorker (2007)-
