Faye Wong and Tony Leung share a romantic moment in Wong Kar-wai's highly anticpated 2046.

True R no longer stands for movie romance. It means something outrageous, pushing the envelope and crossing the line of taste.

Sight gags, sex jokes and gross-out scenes tumble out one after another in Wedding Crashers, the hugely popular and laugh-out-loud funny R-rated comedy starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn and directed by David Dobkin.

The Wedding Crashers men are in love with two pretty bridesmaids, but you wouldn't guess that from the way they act. Buffoonery replaces declarations of true love throughout the film, which is what one wants from a movie comedy, especially one as clever and as unabashedly lewd as Wedding Crashers.

The life lessons practiced by Vaughn and Wilson are this: Humor -- with some well-placed lies about one's status in the world -- will get the girl out of her underwear every time. Real romance, the Romeo-spouting poetry to Juliet variety, is passé.

Laughs and rowdy behavior overwhelm any hints of romance in Wedding Crashers, something that's been true of recent romantic comedies aimed at young audiences with the loves of their life still ahead of them.

In a whirlwind of American Pie films, Meet the Fockers and others, real movie romance is fast becoming a genre solely for adults, something a boy watches with his mother instead of a date. Even worse, romance is fast going the route of foreign-language films, esoteric pleasures seen by a few discerning moviegoers.

On the opposite side of the multiplex, away from the Wedding Crashers crowds, Must Love Dogs is a PG-13-rated comedy with Diane Lane and John Cusack. It was adapted from the popular Claire Cook novel of the same name and directed and scripted by Gary David Goldberg.

The story centers on 40-year-old preschool teacher Sarah Hurlihy (Lane) and her attempts at love with a blind date (Cusack), her newly widowed father and her large Irish family. Watched with an audience last week, I could swear I heard tears from the aisles behind me.

If Must Love Dogs is a woman's film -- vs. a boys-and-toys adventure like Stealth -- then it's for single women over 40, those who first see relationships as a source of heartache rather than a source of laughs. Pairing Lane and Cusack, as likable as screen couples come, is meant to move people emotionally. The laughs, gentle chuckles when compared to the howls generated by Wedding Crashers, come later.

But romance movies like Must Love Dogs feel outdated when numerous blogs about single New Yorkers and others recount their heartaches and embarrassments from good and disastrous dates with lightning-fast immediacy. Perhaps Cook's first novel, Ready to Fall, which looks at the pitfalls of cyberspace romance, should have become a movie instead of Must Love Dogs.

When it comes to men and women in search of love, the Internet provides quick release. If a laptop isn't nearby, reality television is there to help with instant advice. For young and would-be lovers, a trip to the cinema for a romantic getaway sounds like something your parents used to do. The movies have become a place primarily to laugh and scream, but not to swoon. Of course, it doesn't have to be that way if you're willing to seek out lesser-known fare.

Last year, the standout romance was Before Sunset, where the lovers of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise -- Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy -- have a reunion in Paris.

This year, mystery, drama and emotion come together in 2046, a kind of sequel by Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai to his last film, In the Mood for Love.

While most Wedding Crashers fans might have little interest in the film -- or any foreign language drama for that matter -- it is as hip, cool and edgy as moviemaking gets. It also contains some of the most beautiful images in recent cinema, many of them involving the beautiful women -- Faye Wong, Gong Li, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi -- who make up the majority of its cast.

2046, a movie set around dark hotel corridors and eavesdroppers, tells the story of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), who returns from Singapore to Hong Kong, where he had an affair with Maggie Cheung's Su-zhen (the story of In the Mood for Love).

It's the late 1960s and Hong Kong is experiencing civil unrest. Chow is desperate for work and is writing pulp fiction to pay the bills. In the rundown Hotel Oriental, from room 2046, he writes about a fantasy train that takes its occupants to the future year 2046.

Over frequent voiceovers and dreamlike imagery from cinematographers Christopher Doyle, Kwan Pun-leung and Lai Yiu-fai, 2046 explores a serial womanizer's encounters with four different women as he attempts to heal his heartache for the love of his life. Nat King Cole's "Christmas Song" is an audible metaphor for regrets and loves consummated and ultimately lost.

Re-edited since its unveiling at Cannes in 2004, 2046 is the work of a master and arguably as outrageous as the bawdy Wedding Crashers. But instead of crazy behavior, Wong, film's most idiosyncratic auteur, makes the most visually arresting movie you'll see this year. It's also an unabashed romance, a cry for love that one won't soon forget.

The next laugh romance is Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, a film cut from the Wedding Crashers' cloth. Hopefully 2046 will be fast behind it.

With movies, you laugh. You move on. You grow a little. Then, if you're lucky, true love comes your way. ©