THERE are so many things wrong with the new romantic comedy, “This Means War”, that you might assume that the director, known only as McG, had never actually seen another film. But he must have done. In several scenes, classic movies pop up on TV screens in the background—“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” here, “Heaven Can Wait” there—and in one exchange Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine banter about Alfred Hitchcock's early work. Oddly, they never mention their shared movie enthusiasm again, so that particular gobbet of repartee just makes them seem even less believable than they might otherwise have been.



It's not an isolated incident. Film characters who sound suspiciously like film students are becoming increasingly common, and increasingly irritating. Once upon a time, it was a rare treat to hear someone in one film mention another, and it was usually a sign that the character was a metropolitan culture snob, invariably played by Woody Allen. Things started to change in the 1990s, when Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith peopled their films with characters who knew as much about pop culture as they did, but their extended riffs on the subtext of “Top Gun” were still the mark of a geeky, alternative sensibility.



Not anymore. In Judd Apatow's comedies, the characters talk about movies more than they talk about anything else, whether it's the “Munich” spiel in “Knocked Up”, or the “Chocolat” chat in “I Love You, Man”. In Melanie Laurent's “The Adopted”, the heroine re-watches “Charade” whenever she can. In the egregious “Failure To Launch”, Sarah Jessica Parker impresses Matthew McConaughey by citing “The Philadelphia Story”. It feels positively sacrilegious.

To some extent, this proliferation of onscreen movie buffery is simply a reflection of what's happened in the real world. Now that classic films are readily available on DVD, and are quoted all over the internet, you don't have to be a cineaste to have an opinion on Hitchcock. And when millions of people use websites like Facebook, MySpace and Pinterest to define themselves according to their favourite films, books and music, then it's appropriate for fictional characters to do the same.



The fact remains, though, that most people don't launch into film-studies lectures on a first date, not unless they're in the movie business. When they do so in a romantic comedy it's a giveaway that the screenwriter was too lazy and unimaginative to give their characters any hobbies that they don't have themselves. It shifts the story even further away from reality.



Worse still, allusions to a classic movie can seem like cheap attempts to filch some of its magic—to become a classic by association. It's a tactic that tends to have the opposite effect. Nine times out of ten, when characters start rhapsodising over a great film, it just makes you wish you were watching that one instead.