The romantic comedy as we know it has been through four phases. It was born with “It Happened One Night” (1934), and the glory of the classic romantic-comedy period (Hepburn and Tracy and so on) was the ’30s and ’40s, though it extended into the ’50s with a movie like “Pillow Talk.” The form enjoyed a cultural resurgence starting in 1989 and ’90, with the release of “When Harry Met Sally” and “Pretty Woman.” You could call that the Age of Nora Ephron, since she kind of ruled over it; the fact that that era spawned the term “rom-com” says a lot about how love comedies, in their born-again popularity, were becoming a kind of consumer product. The third phase was the Matthew McConaughey/Kate Hudson era, when the sheer cheesiness of so many studio rom-coms (“Failure to Launch,” “Bride Wars”) became its own reward; the films were turning into…
