Would not be a festival day..without lazily pasted movie lists.
So here, in no special order? My ‘romantic’ films, for St Valentine’s feast day.
Note: these are not all ‘rom-coms’. A few crop up elsewhere in my lists. Romantic, to my mind, is about love, loss, passion, adventure, discovery, lust for life in all its forms and a fight for tomorrow, to the death, if need be.
Romance as a quality, rather than genre: enabling either escapist evasion or brutal head on collision with the realities of life and love.
Here. We. GO!
- BRIEF ENCOUNTER: A most civilised, heart-breaking, thought provoking, timeless piece of cinema.
- NOTTING HILL: Peak era Richard Curtis /Emma Freud/Hugh Grant. A love letter to London, cinema and the ups and downs of a relationship that dares to cross a status boundary.
- THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Watch Han and Leia. From Yoda, wisdom learn. Listen to the music, especially John Williams’ closing swell of soul enriching beauty. ‘I love you’. ‘I know’.
- THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: Café in Florence. That is cinema, to me. Hope! Closure. Progression. Love.
- CASINO ROYALE: Proof that losing a love can, sometimes, make a man o you, at an almost super-heroic level.
- IRON MAN: A joy to watch, meta-textually. The return of Downey from an unjust wilderness, into the power and status he deserved in his talent. And the interplay with Gwynnnniee as Pepper Potts: adorable!
- AS GOOD AS IT GETS: Nicholson at his very best, playing an OCD suffering misanthrope, reformed, by love. A work of art!
- CLUELESS: Alicia Silverstone, personifying, most charmingly, every high school crush you ever had. Hilarious. And THE best adaptation of a Jane Austen idiom, onscreen, despite modern setting.
- THE CLIENT: Watch that chemistry between Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon, across the courtroom. WOW!
- BRAVEHEART: Not for the love of Scotland..no..Mel Gibson’s William Wallace fights and dies, for the love of a Princess.
- DEBBIE DOES DALLAS: Ok, that’s enough.
Happy Valentine’s Day, one and all. And thanks for all the lovely cards and pressies. x
