New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Film.

He's Just Not That Into You

In 2004, comic writers Greg Behrendt and Liz Tucillo wrote a self-help book for single women that was named after a line of dialogue from an episode of Sex In The City. The book, which asserts that the reader has an inherent desirability, also lets her know that it's okay to stop giving excuses for guys who really don't ant to be dating them. By giving modern women permission to take control of their lives by looking for someone who really wants to be with them, Behrendt and Tucillo's book fast became a best-seller. A big-budget film adaptation of an anecdotal self-help book seems a bit odd, but the film rights to the book have fluttered off to Warner Bros., where the loose gist of the ideas in the book have crystallized into a film starring some of Hollywood's most recognizable young faces. Both are destined to have their impact, but which one is destined to be remembered better?

The Book

At less than 200 pages, He's Just Not That Into You is light enough to be able to be read in a single sitting and smart enough to have a format that discourages this. In a series of rigorously formatted chapters, we see a series of examples of relationship situations that are outlined in letters to co-author Greg Behrendt. Behrendt then weighs-in on how the relationship isn't really a relationship because the guy's not really interested in her. Chapters cover numerous reasons why a guy wouldn't be into dating the reader (he's not calling, he's not sleeping with her, he's married, etc.) while simultaneously making sure that she knows how hot, sexy and inherently desirable she is.

Each chapter is split into the following parts:

1) An intro section setting up the definition of the kind of situation the chapter is going to explore.

2) A series of letters to Greg Behrendt outlining different excuses women make for being in those kinds of relationships followed by Greg's responses to them.

3) An "it's so simple" paragraph that briefly describes why the reader shouldn't have to put up with things the way they are.

Continued:       1       2       3