Skip to main content

My 10 ½ Romantic Movie Recommendations (In Honor of Valentine’s Day or Anytime You Need a Smile)



1.    Crazy Stupid Love – to quote the movie, it is a combination of sexy and cute, especially Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. (Okay, mostly Ryan Gosling.)
2.   Dan in Real Life – told from the male perspective. A lonely widower raising three daughters falls for his brother’s girl.  Best quote:  You are the murderer of love.
3.   Falling for a Dancer – an Irish mini-series; a hidden gem.  I fell in love with Mossie the first time he set eyes on his cousin’s wife, a feisty woman in an arranged marriage of convenience.
4.   Murphy’s Romance – a May-December romance played by Sally Fields, a divorcée, and James Garner, a widower. He makes the screen sizzle in this one.
5.   One Special Night – another James Garner romance, but this time he goes after Julie Andrews, a widow.  The one bad hitch – he is still married to a wife with Alzheimer’s.
6.   P.S. I Love You – this is a romance between a widow and her late husband.  He sets a series of letters and gifts in place to help her face her grief after his death.
7.   Sabrina (with Harrison Ford) – this version is so much more believable than the one that paired a youthful Audrey Hepburn with the elderly Humphrey Bogart. I call it the American version of Pride and Prejudice. 
8.   Some Kind of Wonderful – best screen kiss ever!  Don’t miss it.  You break his heart, I break your face. Ah, high school like most of us remember it.
9.   Someone Like You – best bad boy ever – Hugh Jackman! Need I say more? Best movie quote ever:  Time wounds all heels – the mantra for all of us who remember what it feels like to be dumped.
10.Up! – Yes, the animated movie.  What better romance than the one between Carl and Ellie? Reinforces one’s belief in true love.
10.5     Under the Tuscan Sun – this one gets only half a rating because it is the one and only romantic movie where the heroine spends the entire movie chasing after love, only to find that her true love isn’t a person but a place – Tuscany.

Labels:

Comments

  1. JanelFebruary 11, 2013 at 11:38 AM

    Under the Tuscan Sun is one of my all-time favorites. I think my love for the Virgin of Guadalupe began after seeing this movie. Remember the image of Mary on her headboard? Several times in the story, Mary appears as a symbol of womanly strength. Thanks for sharing your list. I'll definitely pick up some of the old ones for rent.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Raquel Martina MartinezFebruary 11, 2013 at 9:55 PM

    If you have time, try Falling for a Dancer. I promise it is great.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy Breastday to Me!

I gave myself a very special birthday present this year – I had surgery. Before you think it was to increase, decrease, or “lift” something, let me tell you it was not cosmetic (though I could probably use a few nips and tucks at my age; the infinite number of creams I buy OTC are not working their promised magic). About four or five months ago, I discovered a hard lump about the size of a large marble in my left armpit.  I had been feeling small pangs of pain in my left chest for several months, but I figured it was just my turn to dance with heart disease.  Everyone in my immediate family is diabetic and suffers from strokes or heart attacks, so I thought – here we go; my turn. I was going to tell my internist about the pangs during my next visit, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the lump. The Drama Queen in me immediately manifested herself – cancer, I thought.  I have cancer. I searched some more and found that the texture on the left side of my left breast felt diffe
9 comments
Read more

Dating Challenged

I stink at dating – always have.   I sputter.   I hyperventilate.   I fail miserably every time. I blame a pathetically underdeveloped gene that got little use before I married in my early twenties, then atrophied, gathering dust and rust, until I became single again in my fifties.   I decided to use this defect to my advantage when I needed to do some investigative reporting a few years back.   While on a newspaper writing assignment on Boomer-aged dating, I sacrificed my dignity and my vanity for the sake of the story (and I got several). Thank goodness, HoneyBunch saved me from all this when we married.  (He comes up with the best dates.) I’ve decided I will “show you mine if you show me yours.”   I will swap dating horror stories with you, but you have to promise to play along. The trick here is to tell about your worst date in 25 words or less.   You must keep it clean and you cannot name names. Our little contest will run only this week and before my next blogger posting.   Me
8 comments
Read more

Grandma’s Dining Table

Twenty five years ago my first husband and I bought a new home with four bedrooms and three baths, but my favorite part of the house was the enormous room you walked into from the front door. It had no dividing wall but the design was to use half of it as a formal living and the other half as a formal dining. From the beginning I decided to make it into one huge dining room that would catch the eye when everyone walked in through the front door of my home.   My three children were very young, but I envisioned them grown and married. We counted five at the time, but one day we would grow to eight, maybe more if we factored in grandchildren, so I bought a table that sat a family of twelve.  My husband thought it silly to look that far ahead and convinced me to buy only ten chairs. The room looked magnificent – the long, majestic table, the ten chairs, the buffet, a couple of real ficus, and a few other nice pieces of furniture – I was pleased. The table lasted longer than t
6 comments
Read more