Happy V-Day … Happy “I’d Rather Stick a Fork In My Eye Than Buy a Hallmark Card” Day

(From 2005)

Don’t you love a day that celebrate loves to the point of such crass commercialism that it sucks any ounce of geninue feeling out of romance and makes people who are single feel hopelessly defective? Yeah, me too. Here are a few movie suggestion to help pass the day without fear of injury or bodily harm to yourself or others in your line of vision.

The Classic Love
Notorious (1946)
Ingrid Bergman plays a woman of “questionable” virtue recruited by a government agency organization to go deep undercover as an operative to gather intelligence on Nazis laying low in South America who are threatening to re-arm and do harm against the American bastards who defeated them in WWII. Cary Grant plays her CIA handler and lets just say he handles more than he should. Against his better judgment, Grant falls head over heels in love with a woman sent off to bed another man. Think of it as Alias… but with Nazis and sans mystical subplots. Grant and Bergman define smoldering as their longing gazes and hot kisses make this spy thriller the most erotically charged film Alfred Hitchcock ever directed.

The Funny Valentine
When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
Can men and women really be just friends? Oh the world’s most eternally question. Right up there with who is on first and why is the sky blue. Who knows the answer, but this Rob Reiner romantic comedy is definitely the best relationship movie to try to tackle some sort of answer. And that answer is a resounding … just maybe. With witty, sharp dialogue by Nora Ephron, great chemistry between leads Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, a New York backdrop and a classic jazz soundtrack by Harry Connick Jr, this film is a ready-made recipe for romance. I dare you not to get the warm fuzzy at the film’s climax. And guys, if you want your lady to melt… really all you have to do is say “when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone you’d like the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

The Tragic
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
You will either love it with a passion or hate with the fire of a thousand suns, but Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern musical was a unique, ballsy experiment and I tip my hat to that. Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor star as doomed lovers in 19th century Paris. It is one of those classic stories: boy meets girl, girl is a woman of the night, boy is devastated, girl fights feelings for boy, boy and girl try to make a go of a relationship, girl dies of consumption. With music by Madonna, The Police, Nirvana and LaBelle (just to name of few), this film could have been a disastrous failure on every level imaginable, yet, somehow McGregor’s honesty and intensity make it work. The can-can dancing didn’t hurt either.

The Thrill
The Big Easy (1986)
This film is not perfect. It’s gritty, dirty and a little rough around the edges which makes it just damn good. Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid star in a suspense thriller about police corruption, gangs and heroine in 1980’s New Orleans. What could have been another forgettable 80’s thriller is redeemed by the sharp script that isn’t afraid to be funny, a bit goofy and romantic. Barkin and Quaid are perfection. For my money - not that my currency is ever good in this arena - this film features the best sex scene ever captured on film. If I ever make a movie, I will force my actors to watch that scene for pointers on how it is done.

The Gay Love
Show Me Love (1998)
A small, little movie that became Sweden’s top grossing film of 1998. An all-too realistic look at High School, Swedish-style as the film follows the tale of two girls, one a popular, beautiful, disenchanted, bored girl who wants more out of life than a promise of love, marriage and kids, the other, a lonely, sullen, unpopular yet confident girl who has a painfully acute crush her more beautiful classmate. Through each other, they discover the freedom to be themselves and that they are not so different. Sweet, funny and unapologetic look at what it means to be young, what it means to be gay and what it means to find the confidence to be yourself.

The Teen Angst
Say Anything… (1989)
Haters, to the left. In my opinion, this movie is perfect. I wouldn’t change a frame. A line. An edit. Anything. Cameron Crowe created the most crush-worthy romantic lead and basically ruined me for all men. Lloyd Dobler is my dream man. A high school misfit begins an unlikely romance with the class valedictorian surprising everyone around them, but can their love survive the world telling them they shouldn’t be together? Would this be a favorite if the answer to that question wasn’t yes.

It’s a Love Story.. really…
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
This is love, David Lynch style. Naomi Watts delivers the performance of a lifetime in a film that really can’t be described, but I’ll give it the old, college try. Watts is a young Hollywood starlet who gets caught up in a murder mystery when a lost woman with amnesia stumbles upon her doorstep… well, in her shower actually. What follows is the most intriguing mind-fuck of the past decade. The story leads you one way than instantly inverts itself into something all-together different. Bette and Rita would be film’s most adorable couple if their love story wasn’t the fiction of dying murderer’s guilty subconscious.