The #romcomproject overview

A while back, I shared a list of the top 34 Romantic Comedies as defined by the Independent. It prompted a lot of discussion and a ton of awesome recommendations and opinions. And I decided to make a #romcomproject as a fun thing to get me through quarantine (and keep me out of political debates on Facebook).

But, because I am a nerd and a data analyst and an overachiever, I couldn't just stop with the 34 in the original list. Nope, I added friends' recommendations to my list. And then I realized that I wanted to explore more diverse love stories. And then I found the Rotten Tomatoes list of the top Romantic Comedies, which skews towards old movies. And now, the list of Rom-Coms I'm planning to watch is over 200.

In order to do my own ranking, I needed to create a way to score each movie, and so I have come up with an entire ranking system. See? Nerd. Data analyst. This is how I have fun, okay?

Here's how I'm scoring:

• Overall Enjoyment (0-5)

• Soundtrack (0-5): Music is crucial to a good rom-com.

• Avoidance of Icky Behavior (0-5): I played around with this category, at first thinking of it in terms of negative gender stereotypes, but that may not be a workable measurement for LGBTQ stories or when watching movies from, say, the 1930s, and the definition of Icky Behavior can include all types of shittiness. Basically, when I watch a rom-com, I want to root for good people to fall in love with other good people.

• Chemistry (0-5)

• Comedy (0-5): The magic of a good romantic comedy is a solid combination of emotional reactions, including amusement. Comedy is surprisingly missing from many "romantic comedies".

• Acting (0-5)

• Supporting Characters: Some of the greatest moments in a good rom-com can come from the supporting cast.

• Race/ Culture/ LGBTQ/ Age Diversity (-1,0,1): When I started looking back on the romantic comedies I've loved prior to starting the rom-com project, I realized that many were about young, straight, white, beautiful people. Stories of older, LGBTQ, BIPOC people have been made less, and so I've sought out some of these for my list. If movie includes diverse characters or cultures, it gets an extra point. If a movie is racist, homophobic, or uses cultural appropriation, it gets a negative point.

• Cried (0,1)

• Recommend/Love (0,1,2)

• Total: All of the points added together will result in a score up to 34 points. I can then rank all of the movies based on the total score.

I will also share the original ranking (if on the Independent or Rotten Tomatoes lists) or source for getting the movie on my list.

I plan to share updates for every 20 movies I watch, and then give my final list of my top 34 romantic comedies at the end.

If you want to play along, here is my list: https://docs.google.com/.../1Mvv.../edit...

Next post: my first round of 20 movies watched