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The popular stance for men to take is to hate Valentine’s Day. Hell, I know women who talk smack about it. I hear a lot about how it is a holiday made up by the card companies, and blah blah blah. Similar arguments are made about every other holiday, and they are all specious: I mean, all holidays were made up out of thin air, if you look back far enough. Single people hate VD because it reminds them that they are alone, and while I understand it, no one is forcing them to celebrate, so they can feel free to shut up. Men in relationships who hate it do so because a) they don’t like their significant other or b) they are tired of a SO who treats it as “Give a Woman a Gift” Day (which is probably also the reason some women hate it: they feel it makes them all look like high maintenance harpies). I happen to be in a relationship in which we celebrate our love for each other every day, and enjoy VD as a day when we get to be extra mushy...
and make the people around us puke even more than usual. Also, any holiday that involves getting candy can’t be all bad. Of course, I am not here to be your Dr. Phil. This site, like 95% of my personality, is devoted to movies, and that is what I am going to talk to you about. If you have known me for more than five seconds, then you know that I hate romantic comedies. I try to take every movie on its own merits, but the standard “romcom” is just so formulaic: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, everyone learns a lesson, and much shagging is had. It’s like magnetic poetry: just shuffle the location, love triangle elements, and various quirky best friends around on the giant studio refrigerator, get Nora Roberts to write the screenplay, Joel Schumacher to direct it, and find a place to shim in Hugh Grant, and you’re guaranteed to at least break even. To paraphrase the inglorious basterd Henry Rollins, it’s like being on a roller coaster that you have been on a million times before. There ain’t a goddamn minute where you don’t know exactly what is coming, but you do it anyway just to say you did. Well, funk that noise, I say. Let’s change things up a little this year, and try to watch a better class of romantic movie. This is not a scientific list, nor are the films in any particular order. They are mostly horror, though that was not by design. I pretty much just write as stuff comes into my head. I bet you couldn’t tell. Anyway: | 1. Braindead (Dead-Alive): I’m going to go ahead and start this list off properly, with Peter Jackson’s epic, gore-laden love story of lonely, lily-white Lionel, mama’s boy extraordinaire, and the caramel-skinned, Maori extrovert Paquita. Their romantic tryst is tested under the weight of Lionel’s stunted emotional growth, due to his domineering mother and his dear departed daddy issues, his money-grubbing prick of an uncle, and of course the teeming horde of reanimated corpses bent on eating the warm, live flesh of anyone they can sink their rotting teeth into. This film is glorious for its abundant, cartoonish gore, but if you can peel back the surface (pardon the pun) you will find all of the fantastic filmmaking flourishes that have gone on to win Jackson several Oscars. The fact of the matter is, it is a more effective horror film than others because the romance aspect is just as visceral and affecting as the amputations and flayings. |  Click the picture to purchase this movie. |
| 2. Life is Beautiful: It may seem counterintuitive to go from hardcore gore from down under to an Italian Holocaust comedy, but I disagree. This film is also a strong romance, centering on the irascible Roberto Benigni in the triple threat role as writer, director, and Chaplain-esque main character Guido, who woos his “princepessa” Dora with the same childlike wit and charm with which he must keep the horrors of their upcoming stint in a concentration camp from his son. This is a film that manages the incredible trick of making your heart swell with pride in the indomitable human spirit as it breaks it to peaces with the four-pound sledge that is our capacity to perpetrate cruelty to each other for the most gossamer of reasons. Whether he is saving Dora from a terrible engagement with the wrong man or convincing his son that the Holocaust is a game that you can only win by smiling and having fun, you will see that Guido is not a superhuman hero or indestructible action movie star, but just a man who wants the best for his family in the face of a world bent on taking everything away from them, and his only weapon is laughter, even if there are tears on his cheeks. | 
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| 3. Dellamorte, Dellamore (Cemetery Man): This is another Italian film, but Michele Soavi has a completely different view of romance, to say the least; but romance it remains. Dellamorte is the caretaker of a very special cemetery, and his duties overlap into uncharted territory for the average person in his job: namely, re-killing the dead. You see, they have a nasty tendency to rise when buried there, and it is Dellamorte’s job to put them down again, even though the spectre of Death, in my favorite scene in the movie, coalesces from the smoke and ashes of a rubbish fire and in not so many words tells him to cut the shit. Where is the romance, you say? Well how about Dellamorte having himself chemically castrated to appease the woman of his dreams (an unnamed character played by the awe-inspiring Anna Falchi), who is traumatized by erections, only to have her have a sudden epiphany and realize a good stiff cock is what she really needs after all. So sad, Dellamorte. This situation is made sort of worse when she not only dies, but Dellamorte is forced to put her down when she rises. Can you blame him for going off the deep end a little bit after that? Not if you have a heart. See all this tortured romance? And I haven’t even spoken of Dellamorte’s assistant, who has a doomed romance with a high maintenance severed head. | 
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| 4. Orgazmo: Filmed before the cosmic success of South Park, this is a Trey Parker/Matt Stone joint about a simple Mormon boy who gets caught up in the not so glamorous life of low-budget porn and must find a way to hold on to his identity, both religious and personal, while wallowing in a sea of sinners. He justifies his actions by the fact that he is merely playing a part, having the karate chops (hahaha) to play the titular porno superhero, but never actually engaging in any sex (this movie coined the term ‘stunt cock”, which has gone on to join the popular lexicon as “stunt ___”, with any body part necessary inserted into the blank). He has to lie to his girlfriend back home about it, telling her that he is in fact performing in a strange version of Death of a Salesman, where the salesman never actually dies. The whole reason for the porn gig? To earn enough money to give his sweetheart the wedding of her dreams. Awww! In the he gets the thumb’s up from Jesus, so it all works out. And remember: I am Sancho. You are not Sancho. |  Click the picture to purchase this movie. |
| 5. Shaun of the Dead: I know, I know, I yammer on about this movie incessantly, but I can’t help it: it fits into just about every category of film, because it is pretty much perfect. Anyway, the titular character is an everyday working class guy. He isn’t a scoundrel or a bumbler, but just simply a guy who realizes that his life is passing him by, but doesn’t quite know what to do about it. His raving, DJing days are over, and all of his aspirations have funneled down into working a 9 to 5 and going to the pub with his girlfriend, Liz…who doesn’t really want to go to the pub with him every night, but he doesn’t seem to possess the capability of understanding her needs, let alone addressing them. So when the titular zombie apocalypse happens, the inner hero in him emerges. He realizes the love he feels for Liz in a fully actualized way, and undertakes to keep her and her friends safe. Of course, becoming a person cognizant of the good things in his life and freeing his ambition to acknowledge and preserve them doesn’t really make him any better at decision-making or problem-solving, and things get very grim before they get better, but as Liz says to him when he is feeling down about it, “You did something: that’s all that matters.” She doesn’t need him to be a hero, she just needs him to be there for her. Even as people around them are having their intestines eaten by ghouls. |  Click the picture to purchase this movie. |
| 6. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance: I might as well follow up SotD with another movie that people are sick of me talking about. This is the first installment of Chan-Wook Park’s unofficial Vengeance trilogy. Like the other films, the vengeance stems from a visceral, emotional place. In this film, there is more than a love triangle: it is more like a love quadrangle. There is Ryu, a deaf factory worker, who does drastic, borderline evil things to save his dying sister’s life; there is said sister, who would rather die than have Ryu do what he does; there is Ryu’s frenetic, anarchist girlfriend who gets Ryu embroiled in an insane scheme that brings the world down around all of their ears; there is Ryu’s former boss, still reeling from being left by his wife, who must avenge his young daughter’s untimely demise. All of these stories intersect in ways that will surprise and challenge you, but it all distills down to what would you do for the people you love? | 
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| 7. Chocolat: Now, this is definitely a romantic movie, but it also happens to be an incredibly well-crafted film, which instantly raises it far, far above the stereotypical “romance” film. I was initially hesitant about this one, but I watched it at my girlfriend’s insistence, and I am sure glad I did. Over the past five years she has proven to be much smarter than I am, so it shouldn’t surprise me. Anyway, in this film Juliette Binoche stars as Vianne, a single mother running a chocolate shop in a sleepy, sexually repressed French village. When a band of river vagabonds set up shop on the shores of the local waterway, the town is not pleased, which is filtered to the audience via the always respectable performance of the wonderful Alfred Molina. Vianne, already a social pariah to the moral majority of the town, puts herself farther to the left of center by taking up with the dreamy drifter Roux, played by Johnny Depp. When a suspicious tragedy befalls the river folk, the entire town must finally come to terms with their own emotions. |  Click the picture to purchase this movie. |
| 8. Harold and Maude: Okay, so, I haven’t actually seen this film. I know, I know. I just never got around to it. The movie chronicles the improbable, and frankly kind of gross, romantic tryst between a young Bud Cort and a not-so-young Ruth Gordon, who was probably 70-years old when she was born. What it comes down to is that love knows no bounds, and even if you are odd, there is someone out there for you. Just be true to who you are, and judge other people, and especially prospective romantic partners, solely on the content of their character. I think I will make it my personal Valentine’s Day mission to watch this film. | 
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| 9. Danny the Dog (Unleashed): I am going to throw some martial arts your way, because I am good like that. A trailer for this film blasts in my face every single time I put my Shaun of the Dead DVD in, and I eventually broke down and watched it. Here’s the skinny: Bob Hoskins is Bart, a bad old man running a medium-sized bookmaking gig in what I thought was London, but IMDb says is Glasgow. *shrug* Anyway, Bart has raised Danny (Jet Li) quite literally as a dog. He takes him on collections, and if the payers give Bart any guff, he takes Danny’s collar off and Danny loses his shit, and beats everyone in the room to death. The gymnastic feats of Jet Li are nothing less than astounding, and lend themselves quite well to the washed out cinematography of a British crime film. Danny eventually falls sway to the piano playing of Sam (Morgan Freeman), and decides to run away from home to go live with him. Through Sam and the affection of his daughter Victoria, Danny must find his long buried humanity. The budding romance between Danny and Victoria is adorable, even if she did look twelve until her braces came off. |  Click the picture to purchase this movie. |
| 10. An American Werewolf in London: Ah, finally, we arrive at the film that cemented my love of horror for life. There can be nothing more romantic than two star-crossed lovers who try to make their way in this crazy world, despite their romance being doomed from the start. I imagine not every relationship that begins in a hospital is destined for disaster, but ones involving a man who transmogrifies into a vicious, man-eating wolf during the cycle of the full moon, and who sees his dead best friend and assorted victims haunting him the rest of the time, sure is. The gorgeous Jenny Agutter is the woefully poor-judgment-equipped Nurse Price to David Naughton’s lycanthropic David, and as much as we want to see these two kooky kids make it in the end, something about the ever-increasing body count tells us that it won’t. So sit back on this Valentine’s Day with your significant other, and munch some popcorn while watching a relationship that is sure to make you feel much better about your own. |  Click the picture to purchase this movie. |
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