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           Boy...all those AP Exams coming down on you but you're still thinking about that boy there. And that girl there just may like you--but probably not, but it's nice to dream. Yep. Spring and Love. The Earth's time to be reborn and the heart enjoys a good flutter--but of course it also gets its fair share of whooping as well. For no particular reason, I'm writing out a list of my TWENTY TOP LOVE FILMS. Many I've shown in Cinema class under various themes and guises. Your List is bound to be different from my list, but isn't it interesting to know what choices cause both our brains and our hearts to stir. For me, I can't have one without the other; so many of my choices are films that deal with love in complicated ways--having never experienced anything but extreme complications in that department. *SIGH* DOGFIGHT (1991) This film would be a very intense study of gender in regards to love and sex. On the last night before shipping out to Vietnam, four sailors seek out the ugliest women to bring to a bar for top prize. What happens in this very funny, very moving, very profane story is a battle whose stakes are much higher than either the tender, idealistic young woman or the arrogant, macho young man realize. The movie makes this list because of the powerful final minute that wordlessly "speaks" of the power of love through redemption and penitence. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004) Writer Charlie Kaufman's brilliant novelesque meditation on why we fall in love, with whom and what draws and repells us from the person we love. This film survives frequent re-viewings and you see something new you hadn't picked up before each time. What makes this film so compelling is that everyone in it displays a vile, petty, selfish side to them but, nonetheless, are often moved toward their angels by love. It makes me so happy that this film is such a huge Carson High favorite. I think it's the best American movie in the last decade. THE GRADUATE (1967) Often immitated, never topped. A magnificent film that somehow reflects gloriously on the confusing, topsy-turvy era that created it. Add to it some of the greatest dialogue ever put to screen and extraordinary camerawork and editing, The Graduate still provokes after all these years. "EEEEElllllaaaaaiiiinnnneeee!!!!!!!" HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971) A beautiful love story whose cult following is legion and well-deserved. Suicidal 19-year-old boy falls in love with a live-for-the-moment, bouyant 80-year-old woman. Just goes to show you there's a million ways to be. HEAD ON (2004) Love for the hopelessly fucked up. A drunk, loser Turkish immigrant to Germany arranges to marry a mentally unstable Turkish girl who is seeking to flee her domineering Old World family. The two set up shop together and though unrelentingly brutal throughout the relationship, you end up caring deeply for these two. The way their lives intersect and they change each other through their time together, despite the heartbreak, makes for one of the most profound cinematic experiences I've ever witnessed. HIROSHIMA, MON AMOR (1959) I first saw this film as a freshman in college and it has stuck with me ever since. This is a big idea film using two wounded people as a metaphor for memory and loss. A French young woman has spent the night with a japanese man, at Hiroshima where she went for the shooting of a film about peace. He reminds her of the first man she loved. It was during World War II, and he was a German soldier. Countries do not love. People do. And can new love fill in for the tremendous hurt of the past? JESUS' SON (1992) This film has less to do with the love of one human for another as it has to do with one human towards everyone no matter who they are and what they've done. The story disorients by jumping back and forth in time, stopping, then picking up again...all because the film is being told first person by a heroin junkie whose only name we're given is Fuckhead. Though tragedy and despair follow him like a curse, he learns to get his life slowly together again by understanding the Catholic state of "grace". Everyone on this planet is, of course, Fuckhead. It would do all of us good to remember that. KING KONG (1933) First saw it when I was eight-years-old. Fascinating film no matter how you view it. A tragic racial parable? A metaphor for America? Just a plain great adventure story? Or the best interpretation of "Beauty and the Beast" ever rendered. It features an ultimate love triange conflict that means somebody has to lose out. King Kong's heart was bigger than his brain. And he paid the ultimate price. THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN (1982) Okay. There have always been teen sex comedies. SUPERBAD is only the latest in a very long list. This film would have ended up completely forgotten if it didn't have such a radically different "take" on the age old male "gotta-lose-my-virginity-now!" problem. You're watching the movie following these loser guys trying to lose it, but one is the real nice guy who you're rooting for. Nothing prepares you for the ending of this film. Simply devastating and goes completely against the stereotype of this genre. LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1971) Okay. Don't expect you all to dig this very weighted film set in the City of Love. I offer it up because I do think it is one of the most sophisticated musings on how close love and death are related. Our hearts as fortresses and battlefields and what happens when a heart is broken. How do we go on? This film was X-rated when it first came out and some of the sex scenes are quite intense, quirky, but somehow quite real because the emotions behind them are so raw and dramatic. View it later in life, okay? MAELSTROM (2000) What can you say about a film that starts off with a philosophical talking fish, proceeds into a sequence where a woman is having an abortion, continues on where this woman kills a man while drunkenly driving home and through a series of random (or fated--if you are predisposed to believe in that) events that fall like dominoes, where she ends up falling in love with the son of the man she killed. We may have no clue why we live or die, but love certainly makes the time in between sweeter. MY SASSY GIRL (2001) One of the Carson all-time favorites. Gotta love this Korean film for its young exuberance, its humor, its giddy romanticism and its melodrama. Why can't American teen films be this fun and this moving? THE PIANO (1993) Extremely sophisticated tale about a woman "sold off" by her father as a mail-order bride to the wilderness of 19th Century New Zealand. Playing with grand metaphors of colonization and control, The Piano is a passionate tale of a heart that seeks freedom and companionship with another such heart. Art and love have never had such a suspenseful build-up (including the single most cruel scene ever filmed) complete with a wonderfully ambiguous ending that leaves debate possible. PROOF (1991) This is a small Australian film about an angry, loveless blind man, his desperate, love-hungry housekeeper, and a lost young man who never thought about the nature of the world until they all come together. Martin is a misanthropic blind man, whose unshakable mistrust of humanity compels him to compulsively take photographs of everything around him. So deeply-rooted is his paranoia that he believes his own mother rejected him because of his handicap, and so deceived him in her descriptions of the world. PROOF delicately makes the symbiotic connection that one must trust in order to love and love in order to trust. SLING BLADE (1995) Not a film about romantic love but the love of one human for another. A deeply unsettling film about a mentally retarded man and his relation with a troubled ten-year-old boy. The film seems more like a play as we watch the scenes unfold with long single shots and are compulsively drawn into the drama. SLING BLADE explores the nature of love and the sacrifices made in its name for the sake of others. TALK TO HER (2002) Everyone who takes 11th grade English has seen HABLE CON ELLA. We use it because it is a film so rich in story, in structure, in brazen imagery that Pedro Almodovar's masterpiece bears multiple levels of analysis. Not going to go into all that here. Suffice to say this film that provokes strong responses, uses multiple chains of love to bind all the characters together. Comedy? Tragedy? It has it all. And dance as the metaphor for the all the emotions love brings out in all of us. 2046 (2005) I'm putting this Hong Kong film on the list because I love it enormously but it is easily misunderstood and confusing. The main character is a writer of 'fiction' (this very movie) who through the process of embedding real life circumstances into his science fiction he also tries to determine if there is a destination this is all heading. 2046 is a place you visit to relive unchanging memories so that you will never change. Alternately, 2046 is also a time existent only within a science fiction novel when people will access substitute lovers without the haunts of what broke them in the past. So they think. So in his novel, lovers become characters. Feelings become fictional ornamentations in the future. In the present, he cannot connect with the women who come and go. In the fiction, the lack of connection is simply a matter of technological limitations. Think about what happens in the aftermath of a failed relationship or a missed opportunity. We may grieve, but also sometimes we obsessively construct a future fantasy based on what should have happened if things had gone right; if only some vital detail didn't change things how it did. We inhabit that imagined future and interact with our counterpart ghost, making plans and times and places accordingly. We might use this process as a shield and a warning. Or it sabotages, taking on a life of its own as a mental blueprint, directing the actual present and perceptions of new companions. I've spent the most time on 2046 because at some point in your future (after you've had your share of heartbreaks!) check it out. It really won't make much sense to you now. A WEDDING BANQUET (1993) Director Ang Lee got so much more attention for BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN but its A WEDDING BANQUET that is his true gem. A Taiwanese-American man is living a happy, comfortable life in Brooklyn with his gay partner when his traditional parents want him to marry a traditional Chinese girl. They proceed to invent an elaborate charade to "protect" his parents from the truth. A heart-felt story about love across generations, genders, sexualities and cultures to come to a definition of what love truly is. WEST SIDE STORY (1959) A thousand years from now, people are still going to be watching this magical film. Amazing dancing, extraordinary lyrics, glorious technicolor and the ultimate tragic love story. Tony and Maria Forever! Watch it on the big screen!!! WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (1964) If you wanted to know why movies have ratings, it's because of this one. One married couple I know watches this film every Christmas to appreciate that no matter how bad things got in their marriage, at least it wasn't George and Martha's. I am always profoundly moved by this story of love at its extreme. The film is grotesque, horrible, mean-spirited, vicious and one of the most heart-wrenching tales of love I've ever seen. In fact, if a Martian came down to earth and wanted me to explain what love is for human beings, I would direct him to watch this movie. Love is more than a metaphor in this twisted tale. It is the reason that gets most of us through another day. Okay...that's the list. If you have other suggestions, let me know and tell me why. I wish you all luck on your AP exams! Enjoy those Noah's bagels and after all the tests are over, go to a dance, look for romance, see Barbara Ann and maybe take a chance.... Oh yeah...i didn't include THE TITANIC, but nonetheless, you guys know my heart will go on.          Post a comment in response: |
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