I’m such a hopeless fucking romantic. You’d never know it to read most of the bizzaro shit I post here, but underneath my caustic exterior beats a heart of pudding.
I try to hide it. I’m not terribly proud of the fact that I get all mushy at romantic comedies. Not all of them, mind you. I’m happy to say that dreck like You’ve Got Mail bounces off the stiff wall of sarcasm I’ve spent many years lovingly constructing.
But a good movie? I just turn into a smiling, giggling idiot.
I was blissfully reintroduced to this phenomenon tonight when I rented Amelie, an excellent movie that comes from France. It is in French, but the subtitles are large enough that you can actually read them, and is actually good as opposed to existentialist and pretentious, like French movies have a tendency to be.
I’m not sure what it was about the movie that made me love it so much. Maybe it was the elaborate lengths that Amelie goes to in order to work up the courage to speak to her true love. Maybe it was the hilariously paranoid excuses she came up with for someone being late. Maybe it was the scene where her love walks out, and she quite literally melts.
I think movies affect you most when you see a little bit of yourself in the characters. The trick to making a great movie is to make one that hits on some common chord of humanity, and this movie really nailed it in my book.
Sometimes however, you’re just in the mood to believe true love exists again, and you watch something like this, and it makes you smile. I’ve been grinning like an idiot for an hour now, and I really forgot how good that can be.
Though I did get a funny look from the clerk at <a href=”http://www.worldfranchising.com/Top50/Retail/WhiteHen1.html” target=
“_blank”>White Hen when I went to buy milk.
I promise I will return to my regularly scheduled snideness tomorrow.