2009 has been a tough year for standard-issue romantic comedies.  “The Proposal,” which in any other year would have been a decent entry in a tired genre, really looked simple next to genre-benders “500 Days of Summer” and “Paper Heart.”  The film is decent, for what it is.  People who like the “Sweet Home Alabama”s and “Maid in Manhattan”s of the world will feel right at home with this one.  But those select few should’ve caught the film in theaters; there’s no real reason to buy the DVD.  More after the jump.

With only hours to go before Hollywood’s golden season draws to a close, I thought it was a good time to do the post-mortem on the summer of 2009.  By now you may have heard that this summer was Hollywood’s most-profitable ever with grosses topping $4.3 billion. But has it felt like the biggest summer ever?  Not really.  Blockbusters like “Transformers 2″ and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” aside, 2009 was a season of expensive movies that didn’t live up to the hype and cheap movies that performed above all expectations.  Follow me now into the murky world of box office number crunching to see just how huge Hollywood’s hugest summer really was.

Conventional wisdom puts Sandra Bullock as one of the only female movie stars who is a legitimate box office draw.  Until Friday, however, this conventional wisdom was kind of hard to prove.  Though Bullock’s films, especially those that fall in the romantic comedy category, have performed well in the long run, a surprising number of those films never got out of the $15 million dollar range on their opening weekends.  New entry “The Proposal” handily bucked that trend with a three day total of $34 million off of 3,056 runs.  The Disney release co-starring Ryan Reynolds (who, incidentally, already has a much-better opening under his belt thanks to “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”) easily beat back competition from the week’s other comedies, including Sony’s “Year One” and holdover hit “The Hangover”, to claim preeminence at the weekend box-office.

Another week of weak sauce at the box office has led to another surprise upset.  On Thursday it looked as if it would be a three-way fight for the top spot as “The Hangover” put its two-week winning streak up against new comedy challengers “The Proposal” and “Year One”.  In this lackluster June all three films were expected to bring in weekend totals in the $20 million range.  Instead, it was a fight to see who would come in second as Disney’s “The Proposal” became the clear box-office winner with over $12 million in grosses. This makes the film the biggest opener of Sandra Bullock’s career and puts it on track for a weekend take above $30 million.  It’s still anyone’s race for number two as “The Hangover” and Sony’s “Year One” both brought in around $8.5 million.  Check back tomorrow to see who gets the upper hand…

“The Proposal” is a nice reminder that not all romantic comedies have to crush our souls into a fine powder.  If you have talented leads working from a script with sharp dialogue, then you can make for a fine date night flick.  While it needs a slightly longer set-up, goes too mawkish in its third act, and relies too heavily on Betty White in the “wacky-granny” role, watching Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds snipe at each other is absolutely delightful and worth the price of admission.

Opening June 19^th is director Anne Fletcher’s “The Proposal”. The film is the latest offering in the romantic comedy genre and this one stars Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds.

While I’m forced to see a lot of romantic comedies, I have to say, this one was a lot better than I expected. If you’ve got a girlfriend/wife/significant other that loves this genre and they’re always asking you to go with them, this is the one to bite the bullet on as Ryan Reynolds is very funny.

Anyway, we’ve been provided with six clips from the film and they’re all after the jump - along with a full synopsis. Take a look. If you’ve got some thoughts abou to clips, please leave some comments.