Top 5: Top 5 Modern Romantic Movies

     Usually I try to match these Top 5 lists to something that is going on or the head space I'm in.  Don't think for a minute that is the case this week.  Romance is that last thing on my mind and the thought of these movies makes me a little sick at the moment.  But I needed a Top 5, so I reached into my files and pulled this one out.  It was originally based on Entertainment Weekly's list of the top Modern Romance Movies (they defined modern as anything released in the last 25 years).  I decided to do my version of that list.  Here it is.  By the way, when I wrote the original I included a side note that I still stand by.  It said... I don't believe in the importance placed on "true love" in any of these movies except maybe #1.  I feel there is to much emphasis on this notion in today's society which causes people to rush into foolish relationships.  None the less, I do enjoy the emotions that they stir up...

5) Braveheart
          Sure, it's a great war movie about a people's fight for freedom and has some classicly gory battle scenes, but let's not forget what pushes the plot along, Wallace's love for his murdered wife.  Take away the amazing landscapes and the ispirational speeches and the funny Irishman, and you have a wonderfully romantic movie.  This story is all about the lengths a man will go to for love or to avenge that lost love.

4) Return To Me
          I don't know that most people know or remember this movie but it really got to me.  It starred Minnie Driver and David Duchovny.  Duchovny's wife dies and is an organ donor who's heart goes to Driver.  The two meet and fall in love, Duchovny unaware that Driver has his wife's heart.  Interesting twist to the classic love story.  Very well done.  It paints a great picture of relationships between men and women, whither it's Driver and Duchovny or Driver's best friend and her husband or the old people in the bar.  The movie also has one of the saddest scenes I've ever seen.  After the wife dies, the couples dog refuses to leave the front door because he is waiting his dead master to come home.  Heart breaking!

3)  When Harry Met Sally
          I've lived my life by this movie's theory.  As Billy Crystal says early in the film, men and women can't be friends, eventually sex gets in the way.  Of course there are many corollaries to the theory, but I think it stands up.  Just a great movie about two people who can't deny the inevitable.  I think we all hope to have someone like this in our lives at some point.  Where there's chemistry there, there's chemistry there.  Why fight it?

2)  The Princess Bride
          At this point, this movie falls one year short of fitting into the 25 year limit, but I don't care, I'm keeping it in anyway.  I don't feel I have to do much explaining on this one.  If you don't think this is one of the greatest movies ever made, I don't have much to say to you.  Funny, exciting, tender, this movie has it all.  A wonderful story about true love, set in the perfect place for it (a fictional world, because true love like this isn't real).

1) Say Anything
          A John Cusack classic, written and directed by the master of modern romance, Cameron Crowe.  A great story about the imperfections of love and intentions.  It raises great questions about what is worth fighting for and what is not and showcases the dangers of putting loved ones on a pedestal.  Plus, what girl never dreamed of having a Lloyd Dobler pining after them?

Girl Problems: 13 Year Old Boy

          After a while all these stores start to sound the same.  They almost all come down to the same issue, that I have the dating skills of a 13-year old.  Call it a lack of confidence, a fear of rejection, a need to never appear vulnerable, but it still all boils down to a lack of skill when dealing with the opposite sex.  As much as I tend to paint myself as the type of guy the ladies just aren’t that into, someone they find ugly and uninteresting, that really isn’t the case.  I’ve never had a hard time finding girls who were attracted to me or at the very least really enjoyed my company.  The real issue has been finding girls I’M attracted to, who are single, and who return my feelings, and when I find them actually sealing the deal.  A guy my age should be able to meet a girl he likes and not have any problem expressing those feelings.  I, on the other hand, revert to a 13-year old whenever I’m in the presence of a girl I like, becoming silent and awkward, spiraling into a vortex of self-doubt and self-hatred.  It makes getting a girlfriend pretty difficult.  Every once and a while, I somehow rise above that behavior though, and something nice comes of it.

            I entered my senior year of college hopelessly single.  I had spent the last three years pining over my relationship with Sara, a relationship that had long been over, and doing whatever I could to prevent any new ones from springing up.  The cliché goes something to the effect that loves happens when you least expect it.  I guess that’s what happened to me.  I showed up to work one day (I worked backstage of the school theater) and was introduced to a new female co-worker wearing a large hoody that hid a boyish frame, we’ll call her Michelle.  There was nothing strikingly attractive about her or anything that really stood out, so she kind of melted into the background as I went about the tasks I needed too complete.  Then one day, during a slow point in a show call we were both working, she made some comment and I fell almost instantly in love; she came charging out of the shadows and I saw the beauty that had been in front of me for weeks.  It’s a little sad to say, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it was she said anymore and I know that hurts the story, but I it was something depressing and existential and I knew from the moment she uttered it that this was someone who got it, who would get me.

            So, I started to talk to her more at work, tried to match up my tasks with hers so we could spend more time together, and continued to find more and more we had in common.  We both worshipped professional wrestling (yes, there was a time when my career aspirations were to write for the WWE), we enjoyed the same styles of music (punk, alternative rock, 80’s hair metal, anything with super depressing lyrics), we watched the same stupid television shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, South Park, Monday Night Raw), we loved the whole experience of seeing movies in the theater (literally any movie), we drank like fish (she told tales of finishing a 5^th of Whiskey herself, I was impressed).  And she had a dark side, a side that was deeply pessimistic and searched for meaning in everything.  It ended up being too dark a side, but it was certainly the side that I feel head over heels for.  But there was one major problem, a theme that has reared its head more times then I would like in my love life, Michelle had a boyfriend, a boyfriend that she hated and never had anything nice to say about, but a boyfriend none the less.  So, we became really good friends, and she would come over my place and watch wrestling pay-per-views, and we would go out to dinner and movies, and go to concerts together, and I would tell her about Sara and she would talk about the jerk she was dating and nothing would happen.

            I remember quite clearly the day that everything changed.  I showed up at her dorm room, picking her up for a night in Santa Monica, dinner and a movie (I think it was Office Space, but might have been Shakespeare In Love) and she announced to me that she had finally called things off with her boyfriend, she was finally single.  I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to react.  I mean, inside I was doing back flips, it was the greatest news I had ever heard, but as is always the case with me, there was still that little bit of doubt that this news really changed nothing.  We had been friends for months, really close friends, did she want anything more now that she was free from the asshole or was our relationship already deeply entrenched in the friend realm?  I spent the next month debating this question endlessly to the point of complete debilitation.  I read into every phrase she uttered and every move she made and couldn’t get myself to do anything about it.  All of sudden, all the things that I took as old hat when I thought of her as a friend weighed down on me so heavily I began to spiral into depression and self doubt.

            The pinnacle of the ridiculousness the relationship ascended to came during our spring break.  Some how we got the idea that we needed to go camping in Northern California even though neither one of us owned a tent or any equipment that such a trip would require.  The two of us, alone, pretending to be just friends, drove five hours up the California coast, stopping at a Wal-Mart for the tent, and spent three days camping in a couple of locations, visited her brother in Sacramento, and spent a night with her parents before heading back to school still just friends.  I look back on that trip as a full grown adult and have no idea what I was thinking.  We spent two nights alone in a tent, sleeping so close I didn’t even need to reach out to touch her, with her complaining about being so cold she had to put on four layers of cloths, and nothing happened.  Who goes on that trip and doesn’t expect something to happen?  A 13-year old boy, that’s who.

            Everything came to a head the day after St. Patrick’s Day.  Sara was coming out to visit the following week, a trip that had been planned for quite a while but had it’s ante upped less then a month earlier when she suddenly became single.  Much like the idea of “The Rub” from Swingers, the minute I gave up on her and found something new, what I had waited years to happen occurred.  I had reached a point where a decision about where Michelle and I were headed had to be made.  I had to know if  there was something between the two of us or not before I tried to go down a road already traveled.

On St. Patrick’s Day a bunch of us went out drinking to celebrate and Michelle was our driver.  At this point my closest friends had started to openly call me “Sackless Wonder” due to my inability to close the deal with her.  I got so shit faced off Long Island Ice Teas (that classic Irish beverage) that she had to pull over on the way home so I could empty my stomach.  We both had work the next day and while hung over like never before I somehow found the strength to trap myself into saying something to her.  While in the middle of a project, I told her to remind me that I had something to ask her at lunch.  It was the perfect plan.  There was no backing out because she was going to ask what I wanted and I was too hung over to come up with anything clever off the top of my head.  She thought I was going to ask her to pick up Sara at the airport, but instead I asked if she had ever thought of us being more than friends.  I know, super cheesy and super juvenile, but it worked and thus began one of the most intense relationships I’ve ever been in.

            It’s easy to make fun of how I handled things, of how long it took me to address what seems so obvious now, of how juvenile my whole handling of the situation was, but at the end of the day, does it make much difference?  Is the journey as important as the destination?  I can’t say the fact I struggled with how to turn a friendship into a relationship affected anything that happened after.  I had to go through a process to get where I needed to be and is that process really any better or worse then what most would expect to happen?  Have I lost out on a relationship or two because of my issues?  Sure, but at the same time, the relationships have been that much stronger and important to me because of what I put myself through to get there.  I don’t know that I could have ended up dating Michelle any other way.  And I don’t know that I want to end up dating any one else without going through the same struggles.  We all have our own ways of doing things.  I have mine.  My way has worked well enough for me so far.  I maybe single at the moment, but I’ve known love a few times over and that’s more then most can say.  It may not be pretty, I may revert back to adolescence every time I become enamored with a girl, but I guess it gets the job done.

Reviewing The Previews: 5/21

     Here's this week's previews.  And by the way...

F- I will never see this movie under any circumstances
D- I will never pay theater price to see this movie but may watch it on Netflix
C- I might pay to see this if nothing else is playing, if not I'll catch it on DVD
B- I am not excited, but I'll probably try to catch it in the theater
A- I'm all in

Despicable Me 2 - D  7/3/2013

      There's really nothing new in Hollywood and this is further proof.  I have nothing against this movie.  I never saw the first one.  It might be fantastic and this one might be even better, but I have no compelling desire to see the sequel of a movie I never had any strong desire to see in the first place.  It looks like it may have some funny parts, so if I ever get around to watching the first, I might catch this one on Netflix, but I'm not seeing this in the theater.

World War Z - C  6/21/2013

     When I was reading this book I couldn't help but think of what it would look like as a movie.  So I got really excited when I heard it was coming to the theater.  But after seeing this trailer, that feeling has cooled a great deal.  It doesn't match up to my vision at all and looks like nothing more then a big budget extravaganza.  The book could have easily been brought to the big screen on a shoe string budget, which makes me feel that the film makers missed what made the book so great.

The East - B  5/31/2013
     This movie looks really good, but I fear it may miss the point that should be made.  This could be a great commentary about the hypocritical nature of eco-terrorism, but something tells me it may just glorify it.  It has a great cast, anything with Ellen Page I'm in on, so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt and keeping my fingers crossed that it lives up to what the trailer suggests it could be.

Man Of Steel - A  6/14/2013
     When I do these reviews, I try to base things soley on the  preview and not whatever bias I may have.  I want so bad to give this preview an F because I hate Superman and the last movie was so horrible, I want this movie to suck too.  But I know that I'm going to be there within the first couple weeks because I'm such a comic nerd, so F wouldn't be fit my description of grades.  And, on top of that, this preview was great!  I'll admit it, I'm hooked, this might be a great movie.  I've been waiting all my life for a properly done Superman movie, maybe this is it.

Reviewing the Previews: 5/15

I missed a week and a day, but here's another batch of previews...

F- I will never see this movie under any circumstances
D- I will never pay theater price to see this movie but may watch it on Netflix
C- I might pay to see this if nothing else is playing, if not I'll catch it on DVD
B- I am not excited, but I'll probably try to catch it in the theater
A- I'm all in

Bling Ring - D  6/14/13

     A bunch of bratty spoiled Southern California kids getting together and stealing from even more repugnant "celebrities"... I couldn't be less interested in this movie unless it was directed by someone like Sophia Coppola... oh, wait, it is directed by Coppola.  I've never been more bored then when watching any of Coppola's movie.  She has an amazing knack for getting me to watch the DVD time instead of the tv screen.  I have very little hopes for this film.

Much Ado About Nothing - C  6/7/13

     I have never been a very big fan of these modern takes on Shakespeare, but this is Joss Whedon.  I don't remember disliking anything Whedon has done.  It's also very exciting to see that he has brought back a ton of his actor collaborators with him.  But at the end of the day, it's still a modern remake of a Shakespeare work, so I'm going to remain torn.

Thor 2: The Dark World - B  11/8/13

     I was really excited for this one.  Thor was easily my favorite of the Phase One Avenger movies.  It was the most ambitious and the most entertaining and even though I didn't think she was all that good, it was the only one with Natalie Portman.  But then I saw Iron Man 3 and I had to dial back my excitement a notch.  I know they are made by different people even though they both fall under the Marvel banner, but Iron Man was so bad it is going to leave a small stink on this one.

Stories We Tell - A  5/17/13

     I'm not sure if I'm going to like this film, but it looks so bold and thought provoking.  Maybe also a little self indulgent, but I'm willing to ignore that.  It looks to be a compelling story and you have to applaud Sara Polly's willingness to throw it up for everyone to judge.  I'm all about new and daring film making and this feels like it's both.

Girl Problems: The Early College Years

          One’s college years are supposed to be wild and crazy, filled with booze and sex.  But that wasn’t really my experience.  While I had the booze part down to a science, I struggled with the second half of that equation.  The first three and a half years of my college career were spent completely celibate.  It might save me some face to claim that it was by choice, that I was waiting for the right person to come along, but that would be a lie.  I would have loved to have had date after date with any willing participant.  It just wasn’t my reality. 

I’d like to say there were many factors that led to the lack of a love life.  I did go to an extremely Christian school that had single sex dorms and a curfew seven days a week.   It really puts a hamper on romance when you get kicked out of a girl’s room at 10:00 or face possible expulsion.  There also was an abnormal number of married undergrads.  The whole Christian thing led to people getting married young or at the very least being in very long term, very committed relationships.  It really cut down the dating pool.  And to top it all off, a decent portion of the girls who were available weren’t going to have sex unless they were married because of their faith.  At least, they weren’t going to have normal everyday sex.  I knew of a few girls who believed that sex, as talked about in the Bible, was just vaginal, so they could have all the anal penetration they wanted and not have to worry about eternal damnation.  While many guys I know would have jumped all over this, it doesn’t really appeal to me.

            While all this certainly played a role in my womanless existence, I really have no one or thing to blame but myself.  There were certainly girls that had romantic possibilities, I just couldn’t make it happen.  It’s hard to know how many girls I could have dated in college if I actually had the guts to ever push things.  Looking back the three and a half years I went without a girlfriend, there were certainly a bunch of girls that could have fit the bill.  There were even a couple that I could argue I actually was dating, it was just never framed that way and things never got physical.  I’m sure I created a new realm of psychosis where I hung out with the same girl almost every night for months, talked with her exhaust fully on the phone, even drove her to pick up her brother over an hour away and brought him back to campus, yet never breached the subject of what our relationship actually was.  What I’m trying to point out is that it wasn’t like I didn’t have options or opportunities; I was invited to formals, went to parties, had dinners and nights out, I just never closed the deal.

            What I needed was a girl who was forward enough to make her intentions clear or a friend who had inside information.  Of course I’ve always been my own worst enemy, so I did what I could to make these options even less possible.  Everything is so much clearer when you look back 15 years, but at the time I had a way of running my mouth on topics I should have kept quite on.  I’ll never forget one day when I went to lunch with three very attractive ladies who I was good friends with.  Somehow the topic of conversation got around to the idea of friends with benefits.  All three women fully supported the premise.  What I should have done was either agree or sit there quite, but what I actually did was jump up on my soap box and argued that a situation like that never worked out.  All these years later I still believe that friends with benefits is a no win proposition, eventually one of the two partners is going to want more of a relationship or one is going to find another partner and the other will be hurt, it’s inevitable, but I now realize that you don’t spout these thoughts around a group of hot women who are all about it.  I have no way to prove that this event had any effect on anything that happened or didn’t happen later, but hard to imagine that it didn’t.  I immediately put myself in the friend zone with all three girls and insured that they would never try anything with me because I didn’t believe in that type of thing.

            I would love to play the role of the martyr when it comes to my love life.  I would love to claim that I’ve done everything in my power to find and keep a healthy relationship, that I’ve made myself totally available to any and all female possibilities, and it’s the universe that is against me, but that would be distorting the facts.  Time and time again I’ve shot myself in the foot or not stepped up to the plate when it comes to relationships, and there’s no one to blame for that but me.  I’ve always loved the line in the song “Spidersong” by the band Say Anything, “I am cold, to cool to call you, far too stoned to leave my bed, I wrote this song to win you kiss but stayed asleep instead.”  It kind of sums things up for me and my love life.  I spent years complaining that I couldn’t find a girl, but when I look back now I see the effort was just never there.  When the opportunity arose, I went to bed.

Top 5: Annoying Actors

     Turn about is fair play.  Last week was the ladies, this week is going to be the guys.  Here are the Top 5 actors that annoy me the most...


5) Leonardo Dicaprio
          This is a hold over from his early work.  I really can't stand total slop movies like Romeo and Juliet and Titanic and those movie's stink is still all over Dicaprio.  Even though I love The Departed and have enjoyed a couple of his other flicks, I still cringe every time I see his name in the credits.  I get why people like him and I understand that he is solid in his craft, but he's just not my guy.

4) Richard Gere
          I get that the ladies love his suave dignified manner, but there just something about his smugness on the screen that drives me batty.  I really can't think of anything likable about his screen presence, unless you're a woman.  And in all honesty, what movie of any quality has he ever done?  An Officer and A Gentleman?  Like I said, if your not a woman why do you care?  Pretty Woman?  Everyone may like it, but is it really a good movie?  I give him Primal Fear, but let's be honest, that movie was amazing because of Edward Norton.  Put anyone else in Gere's role and it's still the same movie.  He has no talent other then looking smug on film and that annoys the piss out of me.

3) David Spade
          I used to like this guy.  I didn't like him a ton, but his "Hollywood Minute" segments on SNL were some of the funniest stuff put on TV.  But at this point in his career he's become beyond unbearable.  Some people think that Adam Sandler has become annoying, this guy started off more annoying and has fallen a lot further.  I can't think of one movie role that I actually enjoyed him in.  Even in PCU, a movie I love, every scene he was in was that much harder to watch.  This pick could have easily been Rob Schneider, another guy who had funny moments on SNL but has had a God awful movie career, but I did love Deuce Bigalow, so I went with Spade instead.

2) Paul Giamatti
          I feel like this pick has a lot to do with the characters he plays then my actual feelings about Giamatti himself.  He tends to play a lot of characters who are supposed to be annoying, so maybe him being so high on this list is a credit to how good he is at his craft.  Aside from Sideways, which I loved him in, I really can't stand any role he's played.  He plays those characters so well, at some point you have to wonder that he's just that annoying in real life. 

1) Billy Bob Thornton
          I don't get this guy at all.  I don't get why people think he's a good actor.  I don't get why he's considered such a big Hollywood player.  I don't get why Angelina Jolie would have ever been seen in public with him.  He's about as overrated a human being as there can be.  About the only role he excels at and is believable in is his white trash ones and my theory is, it takes one to know one.  I couldn't imagine an actor that makes me turn away from a movie quicker then Thornton.

Honorable Mentions: Robert Pattinson; Kevin James