#and the powerful influence of family. Whether you’re a fan of romantic dramas or simply in need of a heartwarming story

[9yardsmedia]

In this heartwarming episode of No 309, we dive deep into the emotional journey of love, commitment, and the unbreakable bond of family. This story captures the essence of a young man who, despite life's challenges, finds himself deeply in love and immensely grateful for the continuous support he receives from those closest to him. His partner stands by his side with unwavering dedication, and his family’s love provides him with the strength he needs to pursue happiness and face life’s ups and downs. 👉 Subscribe to my channel to stay tuned:     As we unravel his story, we witness the true meaning of unconditional love, where trust and loyalty transcend any hardship. Through beautiful, heartfelt moments and touching dialogues, this episode highlights the importance of having a support system that lifts you up, keeps you grounded, and empowers you to become the best version of yourself. The themes of this episode resonate with viewers who understand the profound impact that love and family support can have on a person’s life. It’s a reminder that no matter where life takes us, the presence of loved ones makes every challenge manageable and every success more meaningful. Join us on No 309 as we explore these universal themes of love, trust, and the powerful influence of family. Whether you’re a fan of romantic dramas or simply in need of a heartwarming story, this episode promises to leave you feeling uplifted and inspired by the beauty of true connection. 🍁𝗔𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗧𝘂𝗿𝗸𝗙𝗹𝗶𝘅 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹🍁 Immerse yourself in the captivating world of Turkish entertainment with TurkFlix Official, your one-stop destination for enthralling Turkish series and movies! We bring the magic of Turkish storytelling to your screen, all meticulously presented with English subtitles for your viewing pleasure. Dive into heart-wrenching dramas, laugh-out-loud comedies, and pulse-pounding thrillers, all boasting rich cultural experiences and unforgettable characters. Subscribe to TurkFlix Official and unlock a treasure trove of Turkish entertainment, waiting to be discovered!

[cleverhottubmiracle]

If you can believe it, there are even fewer good movies genuinely set on Valentine’s Day than there are on not-exactly-movie-genic holidays Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Maybe it’s because of the ways courtship (and therefore romantic movies, and the holiday itself) changed over the course of the 20th Century, or maybe because—unlike setting a romantic movie over Christmas—placing your romantic comedy or drama specifically on Valentine’s Day feels too much like a hat on a hat. In contemporary times, maybe the vicious one-two punch of I Hate Valentine’s Day (2009, Nia Vardalos) and Valentine’s Day (2010, Garry Marshall) scared filmmakers off the date for good. Of course, there are plenty of romance movies that will do the trick as Valentine’s Day movies —so many, in fact, that sifting through all of them can become overwhelming even before you take into account the flood of options available at the click of a button across so many streaming channels.The upside is that within that flood, you may be able to find a romantic movie for whatever sub-mood you’re in—and that movie could even be a great one, if you follow this handy guide. Because the aim here is not just to find you a good-enough rom-com to inspire a halfhearted press of “play” once you and your date/partner/hookup are too tired to keep searching. No, let’s get you a couch-date movie (or, if you’re lucky enough to have a varied and semi-adventurous rep scene, outside-world-date movie) that’s truly, cinematically excellent.The following thirteen romances attempt to avoid the blatantly lopsided, the overtly problematic, and the movies where you have to just go with it to get to the kissing. Not because it’s wrong to enjoy a lopsided, problematic, age-gapped, power-imbalanced, potentially unhealthy just-get-to-the-kissing romance, of course—some of the best romantic movies ever made fit that description. But you also deserve a romantic night at the movies—whether wholly delightful or bittersweet—without an asterisk like “it’s great if you half-ignore Andie MacDowell.” Plus, I’m assuming you’ve seen, or at least understand that you should see, bona fide all-time classics like It Happened One Night or The Philadelphia Story. As such, nothing from the AFI Top 100 will be included here. (Some of them are on the more specialized AFI 100 Passions list, because otherwise that’s a lot of passions to dismiss.)Some of these are wholly comic, some of them are deeply sad, and some of them (well, one of them) involves potential murder via giant cat—which is to say, there’s something for almost any film fan. A few of them even take place on or around Valentine’s Day.In the mood for screwball love: My Man Godfrey (1936)The influence of screwball comedies on modern rom-coms is so pervasive that it’s also become watered-down over the years, so a straight shot of the real thing can be bracing. My Man Godfrey has a romance between a down-on-his-luck “forgotten man” (William Powell) and the well-meaning younger daughter (Carole Lombard) of a rich family, but it’s less of a romance than the likes of His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story (and, not to be unkind, a bit more sophisticated than the animal antics of Bringing Up Baby), while still serving up a delightful romantic give-and-take en route to a happy ending. My Man Godfrey has everything you want out of a Depression-era screwball rom-com: Hoovervilles, flighty rich people, short-suffering butlers, dizzy infatuation, and escape from economic despair. In a perfectly screwy touch, Powell and Lombard were married—but split up years before making the movie together.In the mood for larcenous love: The Lady Eve (1941)Aren’t a lot of relationships built on some sort of con or another? The Lady Eve, a gem from Preston Sturges, simply makes that explicit, as con woman Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) targets Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), only to fall in love with him—and then, when he gets wise to her initial scheme, attempts revenge via an even more outlandish plot. Stanwyck often played tougher and/or sultrier roles than more frequent rom-com performers, which makes her commitment to her character’s criminal lifestyle in The Lady Eve both more believable and even funnier. For that matter, the star of The Ox-Bow Incident and Young Mr. Lincoln doesn’t exactly scream “zany,” either, yet Fonda pairs perfectly with Stanwyck in this fast-paced and ultimately pretty sexy material. This, too, makes sense: Acting can also be a beautiful con. (Sturges was on a roll here; his screwball rom-com from the following year, The Palm Beach Story, is also terrific.)In the mood for scary love: Cat People (1942)You could make a whole list of gothic and monster-related love stories, but Cat People deserves a nod for the degree to which it allows love, lust, and animal instinct to intertwine—all in a story that centers a shapeshifting woman (Simone Simon) who lives in fear of being overtaken by her fearsome desire. Now that the idea of a “cat lady” has been introduced, popularized, and in some cases reclaimed by the culture at large, the idea of a woman who becomes a cat—untamed by mere marriage, stalking and attempting to destroy her perceived romantic rivals—has only gotten kickier and more subversive. 40 years later, in 1982, the demise of the production code and the existence of Paul Schrader would make possible an even-lustier remake, complete with a killer David Bowie theme song. And for that matter, Michelle Pfeiffer’s definitive big-screen Catwoman in Batman Returns probably owes more than a little to this Val Lewton classic as well.In the mood for adventurous love: Charade (1963)OK, I lied about the age-gap thing: This is one. Look, it’s damn hard to find a charming Audrey Hepburn romance that doesn’t pair her with a significantly older leading-man star of slightly before her time, whether it’s Fred Astaire in Funny Face, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, or Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. (She’s perfectly age-matched in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that one is really more of a solo showcase for her than it is a transporting romance.) At the same time, it’s damn harder to not include one of Hepburn’s sparkling old-guy chemistry experiments, so let’s make do with a gracefully aged Cary Grant, in a movie that makes the most of their generational gap, as Grant plays a charming man who’s hard to pin down; his identity keeps shifting as he helps her through a money-chasing caper caused by the murdered husband she was planning to divorce. There are a lot of fantasies, on screen and in life, about people getting swept off their feet; even as a Hitchcock-lite-style entertainment (the actual director is regular Hepburn collaborator Stanley Donen), Charade understands how the potential disorientation can and should be part of the fun.In the mood for decades-spanning love: The Way We Were (1973)Many of the most famous big-screen love stories of the 1970s tend to be sadder and more self-consciously weightier than their more effervescent counterparts from the 1950s and 1960s. The Way We Were is straight melodrama, but its long-range romance, following the ups and downs of a try-hard (Barbra Streisand) and a golden boy (Robert Redford), has surprising weight—maybe because it’s only in retrospect that their relationship looks like one long breakup that neither of them are fully committed to executing. Hollywood romances love to show people overcoming their differences in personality, background, and/or life goals to simply make it work by sheer force of narrative will. So it’s a little jarring, yet maybe also weirdly comforting, to watch a pair of megawatt stars ultimately unable to do.In the mood for young love: Say Anything (1989)Here’s a little secret about John Hughes: A lot of his celebrated teen movies are romantic comedies, and a lot of them, to use some probably-outdated teenage parlance, suck ass. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but as romantic comedies, it’s hard to compare a movie like Pretty in Pink to one like Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, an unusually perceptive and well-balanced love story between the class brain “Diane Court, whoa” (Ione Skye) and the earnest, persistent eccentric Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), a good-hearted teenager who doesn’t want to buy anything sold or processed (and so forth) as a career. It’s hard to make a good love story about teenagers on the verge of graduating high school, because does anyone ever really believe that they’re going to stay together longer than a few more months? Say Anything is about those very doubts, which it exacerbates by playing up Lloyd and Diane’s differences, before chasing them away with a final shot that’s like an optimist’s flip of The Graduate—a romantic gesture no one ever knew they needed until Crowe cooked it up.In the mood for cross-cultural love: Mississippi Masala (1991)Mira Nair’s tender, sexy romance is about Mina (Sarita Choudhury), an Indian-American who feels at home in her Mississippi community, falling in love with Demeterius (Denzel Washington), a local charmer whose Blackness bothers Mina’s parents (just as his family resists his interest in an Indian-American girl). But it’s also about forging a complicated relationship between your heritage and your day-to-day life as it’s actually lived, and whether those aspects of yourself can be reconciled. If it sounds heady, keep in mind how absolutely smoking hot Choudhury and Washington are—and how Nair has a talent for teasing these conflicts out from a sense of place that’s too rare in glossy movie romances.In the mood for costumed, bittersweet love: Shakespeare in Love (1998)For years it took undeserved flak for beating out Saving Private Ryan in the Best Picture category at that year’s Academy Awards, a kind of manufactured boys-like-this/girls-like-that conflict entirely unfair to a movie that deserved more love for bringing the oft-disreputable rom-com genre to the top Oscar for the first time since Annie Hall. Granted, Shakespeare in Love has the costume-heavy biopic angle, but, gloriously, the biography is entirely made up, with Joseph Fiennes playing a tortured artist who lights up at the sight of his temporary muse (Gwyneth Paltrow). Their final scene together is one for the ages.In the mood for musical love: Moulin Rouge! (2001)It’s genuinely sort of difficult to find a musical without some sort of accompanying love story, but Moulin Rouge! has perhaps the least perfunctory musical love story of all time, because its entire reason for being is wrapped up in trying to communicate passionate, heedless, ridiculous love through song—in making the act of bursting into song seem revolutionary in its boldness and noble in its honesty. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, perfectly matched as performers whose acting-first ability to emote openly informs their nonprofessional but deeply charming singing, lead an uncynical hit parade, frequently turning dross into gold. They capture what it feels like for a pop song (even or especially one that’s kind of stupid) to leap into your (stupid) soul. Baz Luhrmann stages every musical number with a phantasmagorical understanding of the overlapping language of film, theater, pop music, and music video—a reminder that you can fall in love with forms as well as people.In the mood for science-fiction love: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)“Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.” It wasn’t an original sentiment 20 years ago, yet it opens probably the best Valentine’s Day movie ever made, as Joel (Jim Carrey) boards a train to Montauk on February 14th. There he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet) for the first time—or does he? Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s tricky sci-fi classic about a firm that offers to erase people from each other’s memories recontextualizes the stormy Joel/Clementine relationship throughout the movie. By the end, the film’s Valentine’s Day opening will strike you as deeply romantic, frighteningly doomed, or gently hopeful, depending on where you’re coming from. It’s the perfect sci-fi romance, where big what-if questions about humanity are inseparable from intimate questions about our relationships—and equally unanswerable.In the mood for honest love: Obvious Child (2014)When Donna (Jenny Slate), a stand-up comic reeling from a break-up, gets pregnant from a one-night rebound, she seeks out an abortion. The clinic has two available dates: her mom’s birthday, and Valentine’s Day. She chooses Valentine’s Day, which instantly throws Gillian Robespierre’s comedy into the top tier of movies set at least in part on the actual holiday. But Obvious Child doesn’t register as a performatively anti-Valentine’s provocation; it’s just a movie where a woman gets an abortion, and the real obstacles between her and a potential love interest come from herself, not her procedure. As a rom-com with a shot of genuine strife, Obvious Child has a terrific command of its small scope, paying particular attention to the rocky, fumbling early days of a relationship, and preserving whatever comes next for the characters to discover themselves.In the mood for questioning love: Straight Up (2020)Circling back to screwball for a more contemporary sensibility: This precisely staged and rapid-fire indie concerns a slightly squeamish young man (writer-director James Sweeney) who has always assumed he was gay embarking upon a not-quite-platonic relationship with a sardonic young woman (Katie Findlay) who’s fine with a chaste, experimental form of romance. Rather than constructing an uncomfortable conversion narrative or a dorm-room thought experiment, Sweeney comes up with a gently pressing, and at times achingly funny, investigation into sexuality, identity, and flexibility, all orchestrated with a dazzling eye for blocking, a keen ear for banter, and enormous sensitivity from the two leads, who carry multiple long two-hander scenes so deftly that they feel romantic—whether or not sex enters the picture.Bonus selection for those not remotely in the mood: Valentine (2001)There are a lot of holiday-themed horror movies, many of them winkingly cynical, but it’s rare to find one so thoroughly poisonous without a particular satirical target in mind. Valentine was the last gasp of first-wave Scream imitators, and as a slasher-centric murder mystery, it’s slickly unscary and nonsensical. As a demented piece of turn-of-the-century sociology, however, it is invaluable. It follows the ramifications of sixth-grade bullying into purported adulthood, as a spurned geek appears to be picking off a group of middle-school besties one by one. All of these supposed twentysomethings (including Denise Richards and future rom-com queen Katherine Heigl) are written as if by sixth-graders imagining grown-up life, where people with full-time jobs and apartments still attend Valentine’s Day parties at the rich girl’s house. Coexisting with this bizarre playacting is a more adult (if still inarticulate) sense of romantic dissatisfaction, placing the characters in an endless and grotesque meat-market hell of misplaced male intensity – and that’s before they start getting stabbed to death. Nia Vardalos may cutely claim to hate Valentine’s Day, but this is the V-Day picture with true loathing in its heart. Source link

[norajworld]

If you can believe it, there are even fewer good movies genuinely set on Valentine’s Day than there are on not-exactly-movie-genic holidays Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Maybe it’s because of the ways courtship (and therefore romantic movies, and the holiday itself) changed over the course of the 20th Century, or maybe because—unlike setting a romantic movie over Christmas—placing your romantic comedy or drama specifically on Valentine’s Day feels too much like a hat on a hat. In contemporary times, maybe the vicious one-two punch of I Hate Valentine’s Day (2009, Nia Vardalos) and Valentine’s Day (2010, Garry Marshall) scared filmmakers off the date for good. Of course, there are plenty of romance movies that will do the trick as Valentine’s Day movies —so many, in fact, that sifting through all of them can become overwhelming even before you take into account the flood of options available at the click of a button across so many streaming channels.The upside is that within that flood, you may be able to find a romantic movie for whatever sub-mood you’re in—and that movie could even be a great one, if you follow this handy guide. Because the aim here is not just to find you a good-enough rom-com to inspire a halfhearted press of “play” once you and your date/partner/hookup are too tired to keep searching. No, let’s get you a couch-date movie (or, if you’re lucky enough to have a varied and semi-adventurous rep scene, outside-world-date movie) that’s truly, cinematically excellent.The following thirteen romances attempt to avoid the blatantly lopsided, the overtly problematic, and the movies where you have to just go with it to get to the kissing. Not because it’s wrong to enjoy a lopsided, problematic, age-gapped, power-imbalanced, potentially unhealthy just-get-to-the-kissing romance, of course—some of the best romantic movies ever made fit that description. But you also deserve a romantic night at the movies—whether wholly delightful or bittersweet—without an asterisk like “it’s great if you half-ignore Andie MacDowell.” Plus, I’m assuming you’ve seen, or at least understand that you should see, bona fide all-time classics like It Happened One Night or The Philadelphia Story. As such, nothing from the AFI Top 100 will be included here. (Some of them are on the more specialized AFI 100 Passions list, because otherwise that’s a lot of passions to dismiss.)Some of these are wholly comic, some of them are deeply sad, and some of them (well, one of them) involves potential murder via giant cat—which is to say, there’s something for almost any film fan. A few of them even take place on or around Valentine’s Day.In the mood for screwball love: My Man Godfrey (1936)The influence of screwball comedies on modern rom-coms is so pervasive that it’s also become watered-down over the years, so a straight shot of the real thing can be bracing. My Man Godfrey has a romance between a down-on-his-luck “forgotten man” (William Powell) and the well-meaning younger daughter (Carole Lombard) of a rich family, but it’s less of a romance than the likes of His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story (and, not to be unkind, a bit more sophisticated than the animal antics of Bringing Up Baby), while still serving up a delightful romantic give-and-take en route to a happy ending. My Man Godfrey has everything you want out of a Depression-era screwball rom-com: Hoovervilles, flighty rich people, short-suffering butlers, dizzy infatuation, and escape from economic despair. In a perfectly screwy touch, Powell and Lombard were married—but split up years before making the movie together.In the mood for larcenous love: The Lady Eve (1941)Aren’t a lot of relationships built on some sort of con or another? The Lady Eve, a gem from Preston Sturges, simply makes that explicit, as con woman Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) targets Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), only to fall in love with him—and then, when he gets wise to her initial scheme, attempts revenge via an even more outlandish plot. Stanwyck often played tougher and/or sultrier roles than more frequent rom-com performers, which makes her commitment to her character’s criminal lifestyle in The Lady Eve both more believable and even funnier. For that matter, the star of The Ox-Bow Incident and Young Mr. Lincoln doesn’t exactly scream “zany,” either, yet Fonda pairs perfectly with Stanwyck in this fast-paced and ultimately pretty sexy material. This, too, makes sense: Acting can also be a beautiful con. (Sturges was on a roll here; his screwball rom-com from the following year, The Palm Beach Story, is also terrific.)In the mood for scary love: Cat People (1942)You could make a whole list of gothic and monster-related love stories, but Cat People deserves a nod for the degree to which it allows love, lust, and animal instinct to intertwine—all in a story that centers a shapeshifting woman (Simone Simon) who lives in fear of being overtaken by her fearsome desire. Now that the idea of a “cat lady” has been introduced, popularized, and in some cases reclaimed by the culture at large, the idea of a woman who becomes a cat—untamed by mere marriage, stalking and attempting to destroy her perceived romantic rivals—has only gotten kickier and more subversive. 40 years later, in 1982, the demise of the production code and the existence of Paul Schrader would make possible an even-lustier remake, complete with a killer David Bowie theme song. And for that matter, Michelle Pfeiffer’s definitive big-screen Catwoman in Batman Returns probably owes more than a little to this Val Lewton classic as well.In the mood for adventurous love: Charade (1963)OK, I lied about the age-gap thing: This is one. Look, it’s damn hard to find a charming Audrey Hepburn romance that doesn’t pair her with a significantly older leading-man star of slightly before her time, whether it’s Fred Astaire in Funny Face, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, or Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. (She’s perfectly age-matched in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that one is really more of a solo showcase for her than it is a transporting romance.) At the same time, it’s damn harder to not include one of Hepburn’s sparkling old-guy chemistry experiments, so let’s make do with a gracefully aged Cary Grant, in a movie that makes the most of their generational gap, as Grant plays a charming man who’s hard to pin down; his identity keeps shifting as he helps her through a money-chasing caper caused by the murdered husband she was planning to divorce. There are a lot of fantasies, on screen and in life, about people getting swept off their feet; even as a Hitchcock-lite-style entertainment (the actual director is regular Hepburn collaborator Stanley Donen), Charade understands how the potential disorientation can and should be part of the fun.In the mood for decades-spanning love: The Way We Were (1973)Many of the most famous big-screen love stories of the 1970s tend to be sadder and more self-consciously weightier than their more effervescent counterparts from the 1950s and 1960s. The Way We Were is straight melodrama, but its long-range romance, following the ups and downs of a try-hard (Barbra Streisand) and a golden boy (Robert Redford), has surprising weight—maybe because it’s only in retrospect that their relationship looks like one long breakup that neither of them are fully committed to executing. Hollywood romances love to show people overcoming their differences in personality, background, and/or life goals to simply make it work by sheer force of narrative will. So it’s a little jarring, yet maybe also weirdly comforting, to watch a pair of megawatt stars ultimately unable to do.In the mood for young love: Say Anything (1989)Here’s a little secret about John Hughes: A lot of his celebrated teen movies are romantic comedies, and a lot of them, to use some probably-outdated teenage parlance, suck ass. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but as romantic comedies, it’s hard to compare a movie like Pretty in Pink to one like Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, an unusually perceptive and well-balanced love story between the class brain “Diane Court, whoa” (Ione Skye) and the earnest, persistent eccentric Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), a good-hearted teenager who doesn’t want to buy anything sold or processed (and so forth) as a career. It’s hard to make a good love story about teenagers on the verge of graduating high school, because does anyone ever really believe that they’re going to stay together longer than a few more months? Say Anything is about those very doubts, which it exacerbates by playing up Lloyd and Diane’s differences, before chasing them away with a final shot that’s like an optimist’s flip of The Graduate—a romantic gesture no one ever knew they needed until Crowe cooked it up.In the mood for cross-cultural love: Mississippi Masala (1991)Mira Nair’s tender, sexy romance is about Mina (Sarita Choudhury), an Indian-American who feels at home in her Mississippi community, falling in love with Demeterius (Denzel Washington), a local charmer whose Blackness bothers Mina’s parents (just as his family resists his interest in an Indian-American girl). But it’s also about forging a complicated relationship between your heritage and your day-to-day life as it’s actually lived, and whether those aspects of yourself can be reconciled. If it sounds heady, keep in mind how absolutely smoking hot Choudhury and Washington are—and how Nair has a talent for teasing these conflicts out from a sense of place that’s too rare in glossy movie romances.In the mood for costumed, bittersweet love: Shakespeare in Love (1998)For years it took undeserved flak for beating out Saving Private Ryan in the Best Picture category at that year’s Academy Awards, a kind of manufactured boys-like-this/girls-like-that conflict entirely unfair to a movie that deserved more love for bringing the oft-disreputable rom-com genre to the top Oscar for the first time since Annie Hall. Granted, Shakespeare in Love has the costume-heavy biopic angle, but, gloriously, the biography is entirely made up, with Joseph Fiennes playing a tortured artist who lights up at the sight of his temporary muse (Gwyneth Paltrow). Their final scene together is one for the ages.In the mood for musical love: Moulin Rouge! (2001)It’s genuinely sort of difficult to find a musical without some sort of accompanying love story, but Moulin Rouge! has perhaps the least perfunctory musical love story of all time, because its entire reason for being is wrapped up in trying to communicate passionate, heedless, ridiculous love through song—in making the act of bursting into song seem revolutionary in its boldness and noble in its honesty. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, perfectly matched as performers whose acting-first ability to emote openly informs their nonprofessional but deeply charming singing, lead an uncynical hit parade, frequently turning dross into gold. They capture what it feels like for a pop song (even or especially one that’s kind of stupid) to leap into your (stupid) soul. Baz Luhrmann stages every musical number with a phantasmagorical understanding of the overlapping language of film, theater, pop music, and music video—a reminder that you can fall in love with forms as well as people.In the mood for science-fiction love: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)“Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.” It wasn’t an original sentiment 20 years ago, yet it opens probably the best Valentine’s Day movie ever made, as Joel (Jim Carrey) boards a train to Montauk on February 14th. There he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet) for the first time—or does he? Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s tricky sci-fi classic about a firm that offers to erase people from each other’s memories recontextualizes the stormy Joel/Clementine relationship throughout the movie. By the end, the film’s Valentine’s Day opening will strike you as deeply romantic, frighteningly doomed, or gently hopeful, depending on where you’re coming from. It’s the perfect sci-fi romance, where big what-if questions about humanity are inseparable from intimate questions about our relationships—and equally unanswerable.In the mood for honest love: Obvious Child (2014)When Donna (Jenny Slate), a stand-up comic reeling from a break-up, gets pregnant from a one-night rebound, she seeks out an abortion. The clinic has two available dates: her mom’s birthday, and Valentine’s Day. She chooses Valentine’s Day, which instantly throws Gillian Robespierre’s comedy into the top tier of movies set at least in part on the actual holiday. But Obvious Child doesn’t register as a performatively anti-Valentine’s provocation; it’s just a movie where a woman gets an abortion, and the real obstacles between her and a potential love interest come from herself, not her procedure. As a rom-com with a shot of genuine strife, Obvious Child has a terrific command of its small scope, paying particular attention to the rocky, fumbling early days of a relationship, and preserving whatever comes next for the characters to discover themselves.In the mood for questioning love: Straight Up (2020)Circling back to screwball for a more contemporary sensibility: This precisely staged and rapid-fire indie concerns a slightly squeamish young man (writer-director James Sweeney) who has always assumed he was gay embarking upon a not-quite-platonic relationship with a sardonic young woman (Katie Findlay) who’s fine with a chaste, experimental form of romance. Rather than constructing an uncomfortable conversion narrative or a dorm-room thought experiment, Sweeney comes up with a gently pressing, and at times achingly funny, investigation into sexuality, identity, and flexibility, all orchestrated with a dazzling eye for blocking, a keen ear for banter, and enormous sensitivity from the two leads, who carry multiple long two-hander scenes so deftly that they feel romantic—whether or not sex enters the picture.Bonus selection for those not remotely in the mood: Valentine (2001)There are a lot of holiday-themed horror movies, many of them winkingly cynical, but it’s rare to find one so thoroughly poisonous without a particular satirical target in mind. Valentine was the last gasp of first-wave Scream imitators, and as a slasher-centric murder mystery, it’s slickly unscary and nonsensical. As a demented piece of turn-of-the-century sociology, however, it is invaluable. It follows the ramifications of sixth-grade bullying into purported adulthood, as a spurned geek appears to be picking off a group of middle-school besties one by one. All of these supposed twentysomethings (including Denise Richards and future rom-com queen Katherine Heigl) are written as if by sixth-graders imagining grown-up life, where people with full-time jobs and apartments still attend Valentine’s Day parties at the rich girl’s house. Coexisting with this bizarre playacting is a more adult (if still inarticulate) sense of romantic dissatisfaction, placing the characters in an endless and grotesque meat-market hell of misplaced male intensity – and that’s before they start getting stabbed to death. Nia Vardalos may cutely claim to hate Valentine’s Day, but this is the V-Day picture with true loathing in its heart. Source link

[ellajme0]

If you can believe it, there are even fewer good movies genuinely set on Valentine’s Day than there are on not-exactly-movie-genic holidays Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Maybe it’s because of the ways courtship (and therefore romantic movies, and the holiday itself) changed over the course of the 20th Century, or maybe because—unlike setting a romantic movie over Christmas—placing your romantic comedy or drama specifically on Valentine’s Day feels too much like a hat on a hat. In contemporary times, maybe the vicious one-two punch of I Hate Valentine’s Day (2009, Nia Vardalos) and Valentine’s Day (2010, Garry Marshall) scared filmmakers off the date for good. Of course, there are plenty of romance movies that will do the trick as Valentine’s Day movies —so many, in fact, that sifting through all of them can become overwhelming even before you take into account the flood of options available at the click of a button across so many streaming channels.The upside is that within that flood, you may be able to find a romantic movie for whatever sub-mood you’re in—and that movie could even be a great one, if you follow this handy guide. Because the aim here is not just to find you a good-enough rom-com to inspire a halfhearted press of “play” once you and your date/partner/hookup are too tired to keep searching. No, let’s get you a couch-date movie (or, if you’re lucky enough to have a varied and semi-adventurous rep scene, outside-world-date movie) that’s truly, cinematically excellent.The following thirteen romances attempt to avoid the blatantly lopsided, the overtly problematic, and the movies where you have to just go with it to get to the kissing. Not because it’s wrong to enjoy a lopsided, problematic, age-gapped, power-imbalanced, potentially unhealthy just-get-to-the-kissing romance, of course—some of the best romantic movies ever made fit that description. But you also deserve a romantic night at the movies—whether wholly delightful or bittersweet—without an asterisk like “it’s great if you half-ignore Andie MacDowell.” Plus, I’m assuming you’ve seen, or at least understand that you should see, bona fide all-time classics like It Happened One Night or The Philadelphia Story. As such, nothing from the AFI Top 100 will be included here. (Some of them are on the more specialized AFI 100 Passions list, because otherwise that’s a lot of passions to dismiss.)Some of these are wholly comic, some of them are deeply sad, and some of them (well, one of them) involves potential murder via giant cat—which is to say, there’s something for almost any film fan. A few of them even take place on or around Valentine’s Day.In the mood for screwball love: My Man Godfrey (1936)The influence of screwball comedies on modern rom-coms is so pervasive that it’s also become watered-down over the years, so a straight shot of the real thing can be bracing. My Man Godfrey has a romance between a down-on-his-luck “forgotten man” (William Powell) and the well-meaning younger daughter (Carole Lombard) of a rich family, but it’s less of a romance than the likes of His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story (and, not to be unkind, a bit more sophisticated than the animal antics of Bringing Up Baby), while still serving up a delightful romantic give-and-take en route to a happy ending. My Man Godfrey has everything you want out of a Depression-era screwball rom-com: Hoovervilles, flighty rich people, short-suffering butlers, dizzy infatuation, and escape from economic despair. In a perfectly screwy touch, Powell and Lombard were married—but split up years before making the movie together.In the mood for larcenous love: The Lady Eve (1941)Aren’t a lot of relationships built on some sort of con or another? The Lady Eve, a gem from Preston Sturges, simply makes that explicit, as con woman Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) targets Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), only to fall in love with him—and then, when he gets wise to her initial scheme, attempts revenge via an even more outlandish plot. Stanwyck often played tougher and/or sultrier roles than more frequent rom-com performers, which makes her commitment to her character’s criminal lifestyle in The Lady Eve both more believable and even funnier. For that matter, the star of The Ox-Bow Incident and Young Mr. Lincoln doesn’t exactly scream “zany,” either, yet Fonda pairs perfectly with Stanwyck in this fast-paced and ultimately pretty sexy material. This, too, makes sense: Acting can also be a beautiful con. (Sturges was on a roll here; his screwball rom-com from the following year, The Palm Beach Story, is also terrific.)In the mood for scary love: Cat People (1942)You could make a whole list of gothic and monster-related love stories, but Cat People deserves a nod for the degree to which it allows love, lust, and animal instinct to intertwine—all in a story that centers a shapeshifting woman (Simone Simon) who lives in fear of being overtaken by her fearsome desire. Now that the idea of a “cat lady” has been introduced, popularized, and in some cases reclaimed by the culture at large, the idea of a woman who becomes a cat—untamed by mere marriage, stalking and attempting to destroy her perceived romantic rivals—has only gotten kickier and more subversive. 40 years later, in 1982, the demise of the production code and the existence of Paul Schrader would make possible an even-lustier remake, complete with a killer David Bowie theme song. And for that matter, Michelle Pfeiffer’s definitive big-screen Catwoman in Batman Returns probably owes more than a little to this Val Lewton classic as well.In the mood for adventurous love: Charade (1963)OK, I lied about the age-gap thing: This is one. Look, it’s damn hard to find a charming Audrey Hepburn romance that doesn’t pair her with a significantly older leading-man star of slightly before her time, whether it’s Fred Astaire in Funny Face, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, or Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. (She’s perfectly age-matched in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that one is really more of a solo showcase for her than it is a transporting romance.) At the same time, it’s damn harder to not include one of Hepburn’s sparkling old-guy chemistry experiments, so let’s make do with a gracefully aged Cary Grant, in a movie that makes the most of their generational gap, as Grant plays a charming man who’s hard to pin down; his identity keeps shifting as he helps her through a money-chasing caper caused by the murdered husband she was planning to divorce. There are a lot of fantasies, on screen and in life, about people getting swept off their feet; even as a Hitchcock-lite-style entertainment (the actual director is regular Hepburn collaborator Stanley Donen), Charade understands how the potential disorientation can and should be part of the fun.In the mood for decades-spanning love: The Way We Were (1973)Many of the most famous big-screen love stories of the 1970s tend to be sadder and more self-consciously weightier than their more effervescent counterparts from the 1950s and 1960s. The Way We Were is straight melodrama, but its long-range romance, following the ups and downs of a try-hard (Barbra Streisand) and a golden boy (Robert Redford), has surprising weight—maybe because it’s only in retrospect that their relationship looks like one long breakup that neither of them are fully committed to executing. Hollywood romances love to show people overcoming their differences in personality, background, and/or life goals to simply make it work by sheer force of narrative will. So it’s a little jarring, yet maybe also weirdly comforting, to watch a pair of megawatt stars ultimately unable to do.In the mood for young love: Say Anything (1989)Here’s a little secret about John Hughes: A lot of his celebrated teen movies are romantic comedies, and a lot of them, to use some probably-outdated teenage parlance, suck ass. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but as romantic comedies, it’s hard to compare a movie like Pretty in Pink to one like Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, an unusually perceptive and well-balanced love story between the class brain “Diane Court, whoa” (Ione Skye) and the earnest, persistent eccentric Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), a good-hearted teenager who doesn’t want to buy anything sold or processed (and so forth) as a career. It’s hard to make a good love story about teenagers on the verge of graduating high school, because does anyone ever really believe that they’re going to stay together longer than a few more months? Say Anything is about those very doubts, which it exacerbates by playing up Lloyd and Diane’s differences, before chasing them away with a final shot that’s like an optimist’s flip of The Graduate—a romantic gesture no one ever knew they needed until Crowe cooked it up.In the mood for cross-cultural love: Mississippi Masala (1991)Mira Nair’s tender, sexy romance is about Mina (Sarita Choudhury), an Indian-American who feels at home in her Mississippi community, falling in love with Demeterius (Denzel Washington), a local charmer whose Blackness bothers Mina’s parents (just as his family resists his interest in an Indian-American girl). But it’s also about forging a complicated relationship between your heritage and your day-to-day life as it’s actually lived, and whether those aspects of yourself can be reconciled. If it sounds heady, keep in mind how absolutely smoking hot Choudhury and Washington are—and how Nair has a talent for teasing these conflicts out from a sense of place that’s too rare in glossy movie romances.In the mood for costumed, bittersweet love: Shakespeare in Love (1998)For years it took undeserved flak for beating out Saving Private Ryan in the Best Picture category at that year’s Academy Awards, a kind of manufactured boys-like-this/girls-like-that conflict entirely unfair to a movie that deserved more love for bringing the oft-disreputable rom-com genre to the top Oscar for the first time since Annie Hall. Granted, Shakespeare in Love has the costume-heavy biopic angle, but, gloriously, the biography is entirely made up, with Joseph Fiennes playing a tortured artist who lights up at the sight of his temporary muse (Gwyneth Paltrow). Their final scene together is one for the ages.In the mood for musical love: Moulin Rouge! (2001)It’s genuinely sort of difficult to find a musical without some sort of accompanying love story, but Moulin Rouge! has perhaps the least perfunctory musical love story of all time, because its entire reason for being is wrapped up in trying to communicate passionate, heedless, ridiculous love through song—in making the act of bursting into song seem revolutionary in its boldness and noble in its honesty. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, perfectly matched as performers whose acting-first ability to emote openly informs their nonprofessional but deeply charming singing, lead an uncynical hit parade, frequently turning dross into gold. They capture what it feels like for a pop song (even or especially one that’s kind of stupid) to leap into your (stupid) soul. Baz Luhrmann stages every musical number with a phantasmagorical understanding of the overlapping language of film, theater, pop music, and music video—a reminder that you can fall in love with forms as well as people.In the mood for science-fiction love: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)“Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.” It wasn’t an original sentiment 20 years ago, yet it opens probably the best Valentine’s Day movie ever made, as Joel (Jim Carrey) boards a train to Montauk on February 14th. There he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet) for the first time—or does he? Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s tricky sci-fi classic about a firm that offers to erase people from each other’s memories recontextualizes the stormy Joel/Clementine relationship throughout the movie. By the end, the film’s Valentine’s Day opening will strike you as deeply romantic, frighteningly doomed, or gently hopeful, depending on where you’re coming from. It’s the perfect sci-fi romance, where big what-if questions about humanity are inseparable from intimate questions about our relationships—and equally unanswerable.In the mood for honest love: Obvious Child (2014)When Donna (Jenny Slate), a stand-up comic reeling from a break-up, gets pregnant from a one-night rebound, she seeks out an abortion. The clinic has two available dates: her mom’s birthday, and Valentine’s Day. She chooses Valentine’s Day, which instantly throws Gillian Robespierre’s comedy into the top tier of movies set at least in part on the actual holiday. But Obvious Child doesn’t register as a performatively anti-Valentine’s provocation; it’s just a movie where a woman gets an abortion, and the real obstacles between her and a potential love interest come from herself, not her procedure. As a rom-com with a shot of genuine strife, Obvious Child has a terrific command of its small scope, paying particular attention to the rocky, fumbling early days of a relationship, and preserving whatever comes next for the characters to discover themselves.In the mood for questioning love: Straight Up (2020)Circling back to screwball for a more contemporary sensibility: This precisely staged and rapid-fire indie concerns a slightly squeamish young man (writer-director James Sweeney) who has always assumed he was gay embarking upon a not-quite-platonic relationship with a sardonic young woman (Katie Findlay) who’s fine with a chaste, experimental form of romance. Rather than constructing an uncomfortable conversion narrative or a dorm-room thought experiment, Sweeney comes up with a gently pressing, and at times achingly funny, investigation into sexuality, identity, and flexibility, all orchestrated with a dazzling eye for blocking, a keen ear for banter, and enormous sensitivity from the two leads, who carry multiple long two-hander scenes so deftly that they feel romantic—whether or not sex enters the picture.Bonus selection for those not remotely in the mood: Valentine (2001)There are a lot of holiday-themed horror movies, many of them winkingly cynical, but it’s rare to find one so thoroughly poisonous without a particular satirical target in mind. Valentine was the last gasp of first-wave Scream imitators, and as a slasher-centric murder mystery, it’s slickly unscary and nonsensical. As a demented piece of turn-of-the-century sociology, however, it is invaluable. It follows the ramifications of sixth-grade bullying into purported adulthood, as a spurned geek appears to be picking off a group of middle-school besties one by one. All of these supposed twentysomethings (including Denise Richards and future rom-com queen Katherine Heigl) are written as if by sixth-graders imagining grown-up life, where people with full-time jobs and apartments still attend Valentine’s Day parties at the rich girl’s house. Coexisting with this bizarre playacting is a more adult (if still inarticulate) sense of romantic dissatisfaction, placing the characters in an endless and grotesque meat-market hell of misplaced male intensity – and that’s before they start getting stabbed to death. Nia Vardalos may cutely claim to hate Valentine’s Day, but this is the V-Day picture with true loathing in its heart. Source link

[chilimili212]

If you can believe it, there are even fewer good movies genuinely set on Valentine’s Day than there are on not-exactly-movie-genic holidays Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Maybe it’s because of the ways courtship (and therefore romantic movies, and the holiday itself) changed over the course of the 20th Century, or maybe because—unlike setting a romantic movie over Christmas—placing your romantic comedy or drama specifically on Valentine’s Day feels too much like a hat on a hat. In contemporary times, maybe the vicious one-two punch of I Hate Valentine’s Day (2009, Nia Vardalos) and Valentine’s Day (2010, Garry Marshall) scared filmmakers off the date for good. Of course, there are plenty of romance movies that will do the trick as Valentine’s Day movies —so many, in fact, that sifting through all of them can become overwhelming even before you take into account the flood of options available at the click of a button across so many streaming channels.The upside is that within that flood, you may be able to find a romantic movie for whatever sub-mood you’re in—and that movie could even be a great one, if you follow this handy guide. Because the aim here is not just to find you a good-enough rom-com to inspire a halfhearted press of “play” once you and your date/partner/hookup are too tired to keep searching. No, let’s get you a couch-date movie (or, if you’re lucky enough to have a varied and semi-adventurous rep scene, outside-world-date movie) that’s truly, cinematically excellent.The following thirteen romances attempt to avoid the blatantly lopsided, the overtly problematic, and the movies where you have to just go with it to get to the kissing. Not because it’s wrong to enjoy a lopsided, problematic, age-gapped, power-imbalanced, potentially unhealthy just-get-to-the-kissing romance, of course—some of the best romantic movies ever made fit that description. But you also deserve a romantic night at the movies—whether wholly delightful or bittersweet—without an asterisk like “it’s great if you half-ignore Andie MacDowell.” Plus, I’m assuming you’ve seen, or at least understand that you should see, bona fide all-time classics like It Happened One Night or The Philadelphia Story. As such, nothing from the AFI Top 100 will be included here. (Some of them are on the more specialized AFI 100 Passions list, because otherwise that’s a lot of passions to dismiss.)Some of these are wholly comic, some of them are deeply sad, and some of them (well, one of them) involves potential murder via giant cat—which is to say, there’s something for almost any film fan. A few of them even take place on or around Valentine’s Day.In the mood for screwball love: My Man Godfrey (1936)The influence of screwball comedies on modern rom-coms is so pervasive that it’s also become watered-down over the years, so a straight shot of the real thing can be bracing. My Man Godfrey has a romance between a down-on-his-luck “forgotten man” (William Powell) and the well-meaning younger daughter (Carole Lombard) of a rich family, but it’s less of a romance than the likes of His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story (and, not to be unkind, a bit more sophisticated than the animal antics of Bringing Up Baby), while still serving up a delightful romantic give-and-take en route to a happy ending. My Man Godfrey has everything you want out of a Depression-era screwball rom-com: Hoovervilles, flighty rich people, short-suffering butlers, dizzy infatuation, and escape from economic despair. In a perfectly screwy touch, Powell and Lombard were married—but split up years before making the movie together.In the mood for larcenous love: The Lady Eve (1941)Aren’t a lot of relationships built on some sort of con or another? The Lady Eve, a gem from Preston Sturges, simply makes that explicit, as con woman Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) targets Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), only to fall in love with him—and then, when he gets wise to her initial scheme, attempts revenge via an even more outlandish plot. Stanwyck often played tougher and/or sultrier roles than more frequent rom-com performers, which makes her commitment to her character’s criminal lifestyle in The Lady Eve both more believable and even funnier. For that matter, the star of The Ox-Bow Incident and Young Mr. Lincoln doesn’t exactly scream “zany,” either, yet Fonda pairs perfectly with Stanwyck in this fast-paced and ultimately pretty sexy material. This, too, makes sense: Acting can also be a beautiful con. (Sturges was on a roll here; his screwball rom-com from the following year, The Palm Beach Story, is also terrific.)In the mood for scary love: Cat People (1942)You could make a whole list of gothic and monster-related love stories, but Cat People deserves a nod for the degree to which it allows love, lust, and animal instinct to intertwine—all in a story that centers a shapeshifting woman (Simone Simon) who lives in fear of being overtaken by her fearsome desire. Now that the idea of a “cat lady” has been introduced, popularized, and in some cases reclaimed by the culture at large, the idea of a woman who becomes a cat—untamed by mere marriage, stalking and attempting to destroy her perceived romantic rivals—has only gotten kickier and more subversive. 40 years later, in 1982, the demise of the production code and the existence of Paul Schrader would make possible an even-lustier remake, complete with a killer David Bowie theme song. And for that matter, Michelle Pfeiffer’s definitive big-screen Catwoman in Batman Returns probably owes more than a little to this Val Lewton classic as well.In the mood for adventurous love: Charade (1963)OK, I lied about the age-gap thing: This is one. Look, it’s damn hard to find a charming Audrey Hepburn romance that doesn’t pair her with a significantly older leading-man star of slightly before her time, whether it’s Fred Astaire in Funny Face, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, or Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. (She’s perfectly age-matched in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that one is really more of a solo showcase for her than it is a transporting romance.) At the same time, it’s damn harder to not include one of Hepburn’s sparkling old-guy chemistry experiments, so let’s make do with a gracefully aged Cary Grant, in a movie that makes the most of their generational gap, as Grant plays a charming man who’s hard to pin down; his identity keeps shifting as he helps her through a money-chasing caper caused by the murdered husband she was planning to divorce. There are a lot of fantasies, on screen and in life, about people getting swept off their feet; even as a Hitchcock-lite-style entertainment (the actual director is regular Hepburn collaborator Stanley Donen), Charade understands how the potential disorientation can and should be part of the fun.In the mood for decades-spanning love: The Way We Were (1973)Many of the most famous big-screen love stories of the 1970s tend to be sadder and more self-consciously weightier than their more effervescent counterparts from the 1950s and 1960s. The Way We Were is straight melodrama, but its long-range romance, following the ups and downs of a try-hard (Barbra Streisand) and a golden boy (Robert Redford), has surprising weight—maybe because it’s only in retrospect that their relationship looks like one long breakup that neither of them are fully committed to executing. Hollywood romances love to show people overcoming their differences in personality, background, and/or life goals to simply make it work by sheer force of narrative will. So it’s a little jarring, yet maybe also weirdly comforting, to watch a pair of megawatt stars ultimately unable to do.In the mood for young love: Say Anything (1989)Here’s a little secret about John Hughes: A lot of his celebrated teen movies are romantic comedies, and a lot of them, to use some probably-outdated teenage parlance, suck ass. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but as romantic comedies, it’s hard to compare a movie like Pretty in Pink to one like Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, an unusually perceptive and well-balanced love story between the class brain “Diane Court, whoa” (Ione Skye) and the earnest, persistent eccentric Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), a good-hearted teenager who doesn’t want to buy anything sold or processed (and so forth) as a career. It’s hard to make a good love story about teenagers on the verge of graduating high school, because does anyone ever really believe that they’re going to stay together longer than a few more months? Say Anything is about those very doubts, which it exacerbates by playing up Lloyd and Diane’s differences, before chasing them away with a final shot that’s like an optimist’s flip of The Graduate—a romantic gesture no one ever knew they needed until Crowe cooked it up.In the mood for cross-cultural love: Mississippi Masala (1991)Mira Nair’s tender, sexy romance is about Mina (Sarita Choudhury), an Indian-American who feels at home in her Mississippi community, falling in love with Demeterius (Denzel Washington), a local charmer whose Blackness bothers Mina’s parents (just as his family resists his interest in an Indian-American girl). But it’s also about forging a complicated relationship between your heritage and your day-to-day life as it’s actually lived, and whether those aspects of yourself can be reconciled. If it sounds heady, keep in mind how absolutely smoking hot Choudhury and Washington are—and how Nair has a talent for teasing these conflicts out from a sense of place that’s too rare in glossy movie romances.In the mood for costumed, bittersweet love: Shakespeare in Love (1998)For years it took undeserved flak for beating out Saving Private Ryan in the Best Picture category at that year’s Academy Awards, a kind of manufactured boys-like-this/girls-like-that conflict entirely unfair to a movie that deserved more love for bringing the oft-disreputable rom-com genre to the top Oscar for the first time since Annie Hall. Granted, Shakespeare in Love has the costume-heavy biopic angle, but, gloriously, the biography is entirely made up, with Joseph Fiennes playing a tortured artist who lights up at the sight of his temporary muse (Gwyneth Paltrow). Their final scene together is one for the ages.In the mood for musical love: Moulin Rouge! (2001)It’s genuinely sort of difficult to find a musical without some sort of accompanying love story, but Moulin Rouge! has perhaps the least perfunctory musical love story of all time, because its entire reason for being is wrapped up in trying to communicate passionate, heedless, ridiculous love through song—in making the act of bursting into song seem revolutionary in its boldness and noble in its honesty. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, perfectly matched as performers whose acting-first ability to emote openly informs their nonprofessional but deeply charming singing, lead an uncynical hit parade, frequently turning dross into gold. They capture what it feels like for a pop song (even or especially one that’s kind of stupid) to leap into your (stupid) soul. Baz Luhrmann stages every musical number with a phantasmagorical understanding of the overlapping language of film, theater, pop music, and music video—a reminder that you can fall in love with forms as well as people.In the mood for science-fiction love: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)“Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.” It wasn’t an original sentiment 20 years ago, yet it opens probably the best Valentine’s Day movie ever made, as Joel (Jim Carrey) boards a train to Montauk on February 14th. There he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet) for the first time—or does he? Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s tricky sci-fi classic about a firm that offers to erase people from each other’s memories recontextualizes the stormy Joel/Clementine relationship throughout the movie. By the end, the film’s Valentine’s Day opening will strike you as deeply romantic, frighteningly doomed, or gently hopeful, depending on where you’re coming from. It’s the perfect sci-fi romance, where big what-if questions about humanity are inseparable from intimate questions about our relationships—and equally unanswerable.In the mood for honest love: Obvious Child (2014)When Donna (Jenny Slate), a stand-up comic reeling from a break-up, gets pregnant from a one-night rebound, she seeks out an abortion. The clinic has two available dates: her mom’s birthday, and Valentine’s Day. She chooses Valentine’s Day, which instantly throws Gillian Robespierre’s comedy into the top tier of movies set at least in part on the actual holiday. But Obvious Child doesn’t register as a performatively anti-Valentine’s provocation; it’s just a movie where a woman gets an abortion, and the real obstacles between her and a potential love interest come from herself, not her procedure. As a rom-com with a shot of genuine strife, Obvious Child has a terrific command of its small scope, paying particular attention to the rocky, fumbling early days of a relationship, and preserving whatever comes next for the characters to discover themselves.In the mood for questioning love: Straight Up (2020)Circling back to screwball for a more contemporary sensibility: This precisely staged and rapid-fire indie concerns a slightly squeamish young man (writer-director James Sweeney) who has always assumed he was gay embarking upon a not-quite-platonic relationship with a sardonic young woman (Katie Findlay) who’s fine with a chaste, experimental form of romance. Rather than constructing an uncomfortable conversion narrative or a dorm-room thought experiment, Sweeney comes up with a gently pressing, and at times achingly funny, investigation into sexuality, identity, and flexibility, all orchestrated with a dazzling eye for blocking, a keen ear for banter, and enormous sensitivity from the two leads, who carry multiple long two-hander scenes so deftly that they feel romantic—whether or not sex enters the picture.Bonus selection for those not remotely in the mood: Valentine (2001)There are a lot of holiday-themed horror movies, many of them winkingly cynical, but it’s rare to find one so thoroughly poisonous without a particular satirical target in mind. Valentine was the last gasp of first-wave Scream imitators, and as a slasher-centric murder mystery, it’s slickly unscary and nonsensical. As a demented piece of turn-of-the-century sociology, however, it is invaluable. It follows the ramifications of sixth-grade bullying into purported adulthood, as a spurned geek appears to be picking off a group of middle-school besties one by one. All of these supposed twentysomethings (including Denise Richards and future rom-com queen Katherine Heigl) are written as if by sixth-graders imagining grown-up life, where people with full-time jobs and apartments still attend Valentine’s Day parties at the rich girl’s house. Coexisting with this bizarre playacting is a more adult (if still inarticulate) sense of romantic dissatisfaction, placing the characters in an endless and grotesque meat-market hell of misplaced male intensity – and that’s before they start getting stabbed to death. Nia Vardalos may cutely claim to hate Valentine’s Day, but this is the V-Day picture with true loathing in its heart. Source link

[oliviajoyice21]

If you can believe it, there are even fewer good movies genuinely set on Valentine’s Day than there are on not-exactly-movie-genic holidays Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Maybe it’s because of the ways courtship (and therefore romantic movies, and the holiday itself) changed over the course of the 20th Century, or maybe because—unlike setting a romantic movie over Christmas—placing your romantic comedy or drama specifically on Valentine’s Day feels too much like a hat on a hat. In contemporary times, maybe the vicious one-two punch of I Hate Valentine’s Day (2009, Nia Vardalos) and Valentine’s Day (2010, Garry Marshall) scared filmmakers off the date for good. Of course, there are plenty of romance movies that will do the trick as Valentine’s Day movies —so many, in fact, that sifting through all of them can become overwhelming even before you take into account the flood of options available at the click of a button across so many streaming channels.The upside is that within that flood, you may be able to find a romantic movie for whatever sub-mood you’re in—and that movie could even be a great one, if you follow this handy guide. Because the aim here is not just to find you a good-enough rom-com to inspire a halfhearted press of “play” once you and your date/partner/hookup are too tired to keep searching. No, let’s get you a couch-date movie (or, if you’re lucky enough to have a varied and semi-adventurous rep scene, outside-world-date movie) that’s truly, cinematically excellent.The following thirteen romances attempt to avoid the blatantly lopsided, the overtly problematic, and the movies where you have to just go with it to get to the kissing. Not because it’s wrong to enjoy a lopsided, problematic, age-gapped, power-imbalanced, potentially unhealthy just-get-to-the-kissing romance, of course—some of the best romantic movies ever made fit that description. But you also deserve a romantic night at the movies—whether wholly delightful or bittersweet—without an asterisk like “it’s great if you half-ignore Andie MacDowell.” Plus, I’m assuming you’ve seen, or at least understand that you should see, bona fide all-time classics like It Happened One Night or The Philadelphia Story. As such, nothing from the AFI Top 100 will be included here. (Some of them are on the more specialized AFI 100 Passions list, because otherwise that’s a lot of passions to dismiss.)Some of these are wholly comic, some of them are deeply sad, and some of them (well, one of them) involves potential murder via giant cat—which is to say, there’s something for almost any film fan. A few of them even take place on or around Valentine’s Day.In the mood for screwball love: My Man Godfrey (1936)The influence of screwball comedies on modern rom-coms is so pervasive that it’s also become watered-down over the years, so a straight shot of the real thing can be bracing. My Man Godfrey has a romance between a down-on-his-luck “forgotten man” (William Powell) and the well-meaning younger daughter (Carole Lombard) of a rich family, but it’s less of a romance than the likes of His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story (and, not to be unkind, a bit more sophisticated than the animal antics of Bringing Up Baby), while still serving up a delightful romantic give-and-take en route to a happy ending. My Man Godfrey has everything you want out of a Depression-era screwball rom-com: Hoovervilles, flighty rich people, short-suffering butlers, dizzy infatuation, and escape from economic despair. In a perfectly screwy touch, Powell and Lombard were married—but split up years before making the movie together.In the mood for larcenous love: The Lady Eve (1941)Aren’t a lot of relationships built on some sort of con or another? The Lady Eve, a gem from Preston Sturges, simply makes that explicit, as con woman Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) targets Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), only to fall in love with him—and then, when he gets wise to her initial scheme, attempts revenge via an even more outlandish plot. Stanwyck often played tougher and/or sultrier roles than more frequent rom-com performers, which makes her commitment to her character’s criminal lifestyle in The Lady Eve both more believable and even funnier. For that matter, the star of The Ox-Bow Incident and Young Mr. Lincoln doesn’t exactly scream “zany,” either, yet Fonda pairs perfectly with Stanwyck in this fast-paced and ultimately pretty sexy material. This, too, makes sense: Acting can also be a beautiful con. (Sturges was on a roll here; his screwball rom-com from the following year, The Palm Beach Story, is also terrific.)In the mood for scary love: Cat People (1942)You could make a whole list of gothic and monster-related love stories, but Cat People deserves a nod for the degree to which it allows love, lust, and animal instinct to intertwine—all in a story that centers a shapeshifting woman (Simone Simon) who lives in fear of being overtaken by her fearsome desire. Now that the idea of a “cat lady” has been introduced, popularized, and in some cases reclaimed by the culture at large, the idea of a woman who becomes a cat—untamed by mere marriage, stalking and attempting to destroy her perceived romantic rivals—has only gotten kickier and more subversive. 40 years later, in 1982, the demise of the production code and the existence of Paul Schrader would make possible an even-lustier remake, complete with a killer David Bowie theme song. And for that matter, Michelle Pfeiffer’s definitive big-screen Catwoman in Batman Returns probably owes more than a little to this Val Lewton classic as well.In the mood for adventurous love: Charade (1963)OK, I lied about the age-gap thing: This is one. Look, it’s damn hard to find a charming Audrey Hepburn romance that doesn’t pair her with a significantly older leading-man star of slightly before her time, whether it’s Fred Astaire in Funny Face, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, or Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. (She’s perfectly age-matched in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that one is really more of a solo showcase for her than it is a transporting romance.) At the same time, it’s damn harder to not include one of Hepburn’s sparkling old-guy chemistry experiments, so let’s make do with a gracefully aged Cary Grant, in a movie that makes the most of their generational gap, as Grant plays a charming man who’s hard to pin down; his identity keeps shifting as he helps her through a money-chasing caper caused by the murdered husband she was planning to divorce. There are a lot of fantasies, on screen and in life, about people getting swept off their feet; even as a Hitchcock-lite-style entertainment (the actual director is regular Hepburn collaborator Stanley Donen), Charade understands how the potential disorientation can and should be part of the fun.In the mood for decades-spanning love: The Way We Were (1973)Many of the most famous big-screen love stories of the 1970s tend to be sadder and more self-consciously weightier than their more effervescent counterparts from the 1950s and 1960s. The Way We Were is straight melodrama, but its long-range romance, following the ups and downs of a try-hard (Barbra Streisand) and a golden boy (Robert Redford), has surprising weight—maybe because it’s only in retrospect that their relationship looks like one long breakup that neither of them are fully committed to executing. Hollywood romances love to show people overcoming their differences in personality, background, and/or life goals to simply make it work by sheer force of narrative will. So it’s a little jarring, yet maybe also weirdly comforting, to watch a pair of megawatt stars ultimately unable to do.In the mood for young love: Say Anything (1989)Here’s a little secret about John Hughes: A lot of his celebrated teen movies are romantic comedies, and a lot of them, to use some probably-outdated teenage parlance, suck ass. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but as romantic comedies, it’s hard to compare a movie like Pretty in Pink to one like Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, an unusually perceptive and well-balanced love story between the class brain “Diane Court, whoa” (Ione Skye) and the earnest, persistent eccentric Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), a good-hearted teenager who doesn’t want to buy anything sold or processed (and so forth) as a career. It’s hard to make a good love story about teenagers on the verge of graduating high school, because does anyone ever really believe that they’re going to stay together longer than a few more months? Say Anything is about those very doubts, which it exacerbates by playing up Lloyd and Diane’s differences, before chasing them away with a final shot that’s like an optimist’s flip of The Graduate—a romantic gesture no one ever knew they needed until Crowe cooked it up.In the mood for cross-cultural love: Mississippi Masala (1991)Mira Nair’s tender, sexy romance is about Mina (Sarita Choudhury), an Indian-American who feels at home in her Mississippi community, falling in love with Demeterius (Denzel Washington), a local charmer whose Blackness bothers Mina’s parents (just as his family resists his interest in an Indian-American girl). But it’s also about forging a complicated relationship between your heritage and your day-to-day life as it’s actually lived, and whether those aspects of yourself can be reconciled. If it sounds heady, keep in mind how absolutely smoking hot Choudhury and Washington are—and how Nair has a talent for teasing these conflicts out from a sense of place that’s too rare in glossy movie romances.In the mood for costumed, bittersweet love: Shakespeare in Love (1998)For years it took undeserved flak for beating out Saving Private Ryan in the Best Picture category at that year’s Academy Awards, a kind of manufactured boys-like-this/girls-like-that conflict entirely unfair to a movie that deserved more love for bringing the oft-disreputable rom-com genre to the top Oscar for the first time since Annie Hall. Granted, Shakespeare in Love has the costume-heavy biopic angle, but, gloriously, the biography is entirely made up, with Joseph Fiennes playing a tortured artist who lights up at the sight of his temporary muse (Gwyneth Paltrow). Their final scene together is one for the ages.In the mood for musical love: Moulin Rouge! (2001)It’s genuinely sort of difficult to find a musical without some sort of accompanying love story, but Moulin Rouge! has perhaps the least perfunctory musical love story of all time, because its entire reason for being is wrapped up in trying to communicate passionate, heedless, ridiculous love through song—in making the act of bursting into song seem revolutionary in its boldness and noble in its honesty. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, perfectly matched as performers whose acting-first ability to emote openly informs their nonprofessional but deeply charming singing, lead an uncynical hit parade, frequently turning dross into gold. They capture what it feels like for a pop song (even or especially one that’s kind of stupid) to leap into your (stupid) soul. Baz Luhrmann stages every musical number with a phantasmagorical understanding of the overlapping language of film, theater, pop music, and music video—a reminder that you can fall in love with forms as well as people.In the mood for science-fiction love: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)“Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.” It wasn’t an original sentiment 20 years ago, yet it opens probably the best Valentine’s Day movie ever made, as Joel (Jim Carrey) boards a train to Montauk on February 14th. There he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet) for the first time—or does he? Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s tricky sci-fi classic about a firm that offers to erase people from each other’s memories recontextualizes the stormy Joel/Clementine relationship throughout the movie. By the end, the film’s Valentine’s Day opening will strike you as deeply romantic, frighteningly doomed, or gently hopeful, depending on where you’re coming from. It’s the perfect sci-fi romance, where big what-if questions about humanity are inseparable from intimate questions about our relationships—and equally unanswerable.In the mood for honest love: Obvious Child (2014)When Donna (Jenny Slate), a stand-up comic reeling from a break-up, gets pregnant from a one-night rebound, she seeks out an abortion. The clinic has two available dates: her mom’s birthday, and Valentine’s Day. She chooses Valentine’s Day, which instantly throws Gillian Robespierre’s comedy into the top tier of movies set at least in part on the actual holiday. But Obvious Child doesn’t register as a performatively anti-Valentine’s provocation; it’s just a movie where a woman gets an abortion, and the real obstacles between her and a potential love interest come from herself, not her procedure. As a rom-com with a shot of genuine strife, Obvious Child has a terrific command of its small scope, paying particular attention to the rocky, fumbling early days of a relationship, and preserving whatever comes next for the characters to discover themselves.In the mood for questioning love: Straight Up (2020)Circling back to screwball for a more contemporary sensibility: This precisely staged and rapid-fire indie concerns a slightly squeamish young man (writer-director James Sweeney) who has always assumed he was gay embarking upon a not-quite-platonic relationship with a sardonic young woman (Katie Findlay) who’s fine with a chaste, experimental form of romance. Rather than constructing an uncomfortable conversion narrative or a dorm-room thought experiment, Sweeney comes up with a gently pressing, and at times achingly funny, investigation into sexuality, identity, and flexibility, all orchestrated with a dazzling eye for blocking, a keen ear for banter, and enormous sensitivity from the two leads, who carry multiple long two-hander scenes so deftly that they feel romantic—whether or not sex enters the picture.Bonus selection for those not remotely in the mood: Valentine (2001)There are a lot of holiday-themed horror movies, many of them winkingly cynical, but it’s rare to find one so thoroughly poisonous without a particular satirical target in mind. Valentine was the last gasp of first-wave Scream imitators, and as a slasher-centric murder mystery, it’s slickly unscary and nonsensical. As a demented piece of turn-of-the-century sociology, however, it is invaluable. It follows the ramifications of sixth-grade bullying into purported adulthood, as a spurned geek appears to be picking off a group of middle-school besties one by one. All of these supposed twentysomethings (including Denise Richards and future rom-com queen Katherine Heigl) are written as if by sixth-graders imagining grown-up life, where people with full-time jobs and apartments still attend Valentine’s Day parties at the rich girl’s house. Coexisting with this bizarre playacting is a more adult (if still inarticulate) sense of romantic dissatisfaction, placing the characters in an endless and grotesque meat-market hell of misplaced male intensity – and that’s before they start getting stabbed to death. Nia Vardalos may cutely claim to hate Valentine’s Day, but this is the V-Day picture with true loathing in its heart. Source link

[sparklymentalitypanda]

Unconditional Love and Family Support | No 309 | TurkFlix Official

In this heartwarming episode of No 309, we dive deep into the emotional journey of love, commitment, and the unbreakable bond of family. This story captures the essence of a young man who, despite life's challenges, finds himself deeply in love and immensely grateful for the continuous support he receives from those closest to him. His partner stands by his side with unwavering dedication, and his family’s love provides him with the strength he needs to pursue happiness and face life’s ups and downs. 👉 Subscribe to my channel to stay tuned:    / @turk-flix  

As we unravel his story, we witness the true meaning of unconditional love, where trust and loyalty transcend any hardship. Through beautiful, heartfelt moments and touching dialogues, this episode highlights the importance of having a support system that lifts you up, keeps you grounded, and empowers you to become the best version of yourself.

The themes of this episode resonate with viewers who understand the profound impact that love and family support can have on a person’s life. It’s a reminder that no matter where life takes us, the presence of loved ones makes every challenge manageable and every success more meaningful.

Join us on No 309 as we explore these universal themes of love, trust, and the powerful influence of family. Whether you’re a fan of romantic dramas or simply in need of a heartwarming story, this episode promises to leave you feeling uplifted and inspired by the beauty of true connection.

[dragonnan]

Speaking at a panel at the London Film and Comic-Con today, the 41-year-old said that there could only be one character his detective could be coupled with in the BBC hit series.“Now, there’s only one choice, isn’t there? Come on,” he told the audience of fans, before jokingly adding: “Doctor Watson.” He continued on a more serious note, explaining: “I think it would have to be Molly, wouldn’t it? Love for him, after all, would be thinking more - maybe that’s asking too much - maybe thinking as much of someone else as he thinks of himself.”

Headcanon Times:

I know everyone, including the actors, have their opinions about the characters but this is one where I fully, fully agree with Ben.  I want to be clear, I don’t watch Sherlock for romance - though romance, in the broader sense, is integral within the series as a whole.  It is heightened and artistic and deep and exciting and adventurous and funny and witty and terrifying and, yes, heartbreakingly romantic, too.

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I had always viewed Irene as Sherlock’s first real exposure to love.  I think there was an immediate attraction and, possibly (without knowing a thing of his history and only going on what the series implied) his first physical experience as well.  I’m very much in the camp that believes he and Irene had a physical encounter after he rescued her from being executed.  I think he pined after her for many years but I also find it telling that he rarely engaged her no matter how often she texted him.  I think he didn’t know what to do with his emotions regarding her and, as has been his method regarding strong emotions, he set them to the side rather than face them head on.  “You didn't win, you lost. Look what you did to her. Look what you did to yourself, all those complicated little emotions, I lost count. Emotional context, it destroys you, every time.”

If the man Sherlock has become is his memory of Eurus then it’s no wonder than his view on emotions would be skewed towards seeing them as a crutch rather than a strength.  His connections with people were severely damaged between his two siblings - Eurus for her own inability to healthily relate to others plus, you know, murdering his best friend - and Mycroft, for keeping that truth hidden and for teaching Sherlock that human connection is something to despise.  At least Mycroft has begun to see how badly he’d wronged his brother, in that regard.

When he met Irene, he’d already begun opening himself up to humanity again.  John was a healer beyond his abilities as a doctor.  He was crucial to pulling Sherlock back from the edge -possibly - just in time.  It’s terrifying to imagine what would have happened to Sherlock had John not entered his life when he did.  Because of John’s influence and heart, Sherlock’s emotional walls developed a significant crack.  So, that, by the time he’d met Irene, he was already in a place where he could be blindsided by the power of these newly reborn feelings.  I think there’s even room to speculate that Sherlock’s emotions towards Irene were so incredibly powerful BECAUSE he hadn’t had much practice with them, yet.  To use the familiar cliche it was like gaining sight where once he’d been blind.  He was overwhelmed and, as much as Sherlock could be, nearly sick with his infatuation. (bear in mind, still, this is speculation.  Sherlock has always maintained an outer cool for a good portion of the series and there are very few times he’s shown his chaotic feelings - but we’ll get to that...).  

We know Molly, by this point, has had an ongoing crush on him and it is implied, based on his response to her, that Christmas, that he possibly wasn’t truly aware of that.  Or, at least, not the depth of it - given his shock at reading her card.  It makes me wonder, then, what, if any, real experience he’s had with attention from someone who views him in a sexual way.  Obviously, with John’s blog making him a celebrity, that would have begun to change quite quickly - not that Sherlock has ever had the desire for such distractions (that he’d have felt desire, in and of itself, is another matter entirely.  Ben has stated that he did not view Sherlock as cut off from things such as arousal - but that he’d have repressed them in order to put all of his energies into the Work). When he’d believed Irene to be dead, he came very close to using again - or, possibly, something even worse.  There isn’t time to explore what he may actually have done because she revealed herself soon afterwards.  It is clear, though, that his care for her developed very fast.  He’d met her just one time - was outsmarted by her - drugged by her - and then began receiving repeated suggestive texts from her.  And, shortly thereafter, he composed an incredibly moving and emotional sonnet for her.  Even Ben isn’t certain whether what Sherlock felt was more love or more lust.  I don’t know that it is always one or the other as so often those things are intertwined - though possibly weighted more heavily on the physical.  In any event, without delving too far into Irene’s relationship, it feels as though they have little to build on, between them, beyond the physical.  They play cat and mouse.  They have a game of outwitting one another.  But beyond wordplay and the occasional whip...  Irene would never be a true partner.  She has a life she loves and a career that, by its nature, does not mesh with the sort of partnership needed between a man and wife (not that I think she’d ever want something as domestic as that).  On top of all of that, she already has a steady female partner that she obviously loves and Sherlock is an aberration for her.  He’s a temporary delight but I cannot see any scenario where she’d want to be at his side, through ups and downs, falling off the wagon, getting lost in his work, family dramas... Well, point in fact, she never was.        

So, now to the part of this musing that I’ve been building towards.

I gave myself a series of questions and I’ve spent a few weeks, actually, thinking about them.  Faithful characterization is really important to me.  I want to see the honesty of how a character is represented without overlaying intent just because I WANT to see it.  (to be clear, this is not a comment on fanfiction or various pairings or anything of the sort.  This is me trying to parse the authentic character, based on what I've interpreted on screen, for my own creative process).  

Sherlock's relationship with John is a powerful friendship that has laid the groundwork towards developing his emotional balance. While he will always be a bit of an arse – suspicious of overt emotional displays – in short, he'll be himself – he has also warmed up in ways that would not have come about otherwise.

Molly is the first person that Sherlock, at least on screen, apologizes to. The reason being for his callous cruelty when he chose to deduce the reason for a gift she'd brought – correct motivations but incorrect recipient in that he hadn't connected the dots in that the gift was for him. Instantly abashed for causing her humiliation, he apologized, begged her forgiveness, and kissed her cheek.

Of course, Sherlock now starts to exploit her infatuation because, still, he doesn't really get what love is all about. He doesn't seem to see what it is to emotionally hurt someone because he's cut off proper access to his own heart. In fact, to leap ahead, it is amazing character growth to contrast his early interactions with her – faking interest in her hair and make up just to have access to bodies – against his honest pleading with her to say “I love you” and then having an absolute melt-down when he realized Eurus had used him to emotionally bludgeon Molly.

“You look sad, when you think, he can't see you.” Molly is one of the few people that Sherlock cannot bluff his way around. But this moment also reveals that she is one of the few people he trusts enough to show his real feelings. Yes, he will show John those feelings as well, but in this circumstance he simply couldn't afford to. But he had to be able to relieve some of that emotional stress with someone and Molly was the one he turned to – even if he wasn't initially aware that he was doing so.

Sherlock Holmes: [waiting for Molly in the darkened lab, she enters and is startled when he begins to speak] You're wrong, you know. You do count. You've always counted and I've always trusted you. But you were right. I'm not okay.

Molly Hooper: Tell me what's wrong.

Sherlock Holmes: Molly... I think I'm going to die.

Molly Hooper: What do you need?

Sherlock Holmes: If I wasn't everything that you think I am, everything that I think I am... would you still want to help me?

Molly Hooper: What do you need?

Sherlock Holmes: You.

When Sherlock prepared to fake his death, one of the few people he implicitly trusted to help him was Molly. Not only did he trust her, he approached her in a very open and emotional way. He didn't simply ask her for help. I've thought a lot about the above lines and Sherlock's build up and what it all meant. What I end up with, basically, is him asking would she help him even if he wasn't the near legend that he has become... if he were the lie he's going to be forced to assume in order to make John think he's suicidal. And Molly doesn't hesitate. She will follow him into hell. And I think this might be a moment where Sherlock was still unaware of how MUCH she was devoted to him. Thus his hesitancy. And, yet, he trusts her completely.

Later, Sherlock spent time living with her while in hiding and sleeping in her room while she took the spare room. “We agreed he needed the space”. I don't, however, believe there was anything intimate going on between them and just given Molly's comments on it, it seems as though it was more awkward for her than anything.

Molly was the one Sherlock asked to go investigating when John was angry with him. He was very quick to understand that it was a one time thing because she was engaged. This was the second time he kissed her cheek; and followed it by saying she deserved every happiness. It's suggestible that he acknowledges her feelings for him by saying not every man she falls for can be a sociopath. Of course, one could read that he's referring to Moriarty but after such a tender moment that would seem a little crass. Though, this IS Sherlock and likely he would think that was a kindness. I find everything about this incredibly interesting. For one, though I've never thought there was anything romantic between John and Sherlock – there also were never any questions that John would investigate with Sherlock regardless as to whom he was seeing/married to. It simply wasn't a factor. For Molly, however, her being with someone else means she can't possibly do this with Sherlock. Why? Because of her feelings for him and, more, him recognizing and respecting that he cannot compromise that. While it doesn't say anything about his feelings for her, beyond friendship, it DOES show that he cares about her and won't ask her to do anything that makes her uncomfortable (another step forwards from series 1 Sherlock). It does, also, reveal something else. That if Molly hadn't been engaged, Sherlock would have welcomed her as a partner and that he'd enjoyed his day with her. Even if they weren't able to go out for chips after – his invitation.

The two people asked to be godparents of Rosie were Sherlock and Molly. If John also died, Sherlock and Molly would instantly be co-parents. I just wanted to throw that out there.

Molly is one of the people entrusted to look after Sherlock when he falls off the wagon. It's a short list.

When Sherlock is dying, it's a mental version of Molly who appears and saves his life. Now, for me, that IS telling in that John is the doctor and yet Molly is the one Sherlock's frantic brain latches onto first.

Finally, as was mentioned earlier, we have the infamous “I love you”. We've seen Sherlock fake emotion – fake tears – fake fear and very skillfully, too. He's gotten one over on John many times. With Molly, though, I feel as though he's learned a hard lesson about hurting her. He's trying to do better by her so he gives her his genuine feelings. And, certainly, in this moment he can't afford otherwise. He believes she'll die and Molly will not say the words unless he does first. “Say it like you mean it” may well have been stated “say it so I could believe it.” And, in fact, the first time he says it, she doesn't appear to believe it. She can tell when he lies and, I think for a long time now, she can tell when he's faking kindness to manipulate her. This is where my honest belief about this comes into play. That in order to get her to say the words to him, he had to speak truthfully. An I think that was why it was so tremendously devastating. It opened a wound he hadn't realized existed until that moment – something far deeper and FAR more demanding than that long ago emotion he'd felt for Irene. Irene would never be compromised by a declaration of love. It's possible she may even find it tragic because part of me thinks Irene, too, finds emotional investment to be compromising. I actually think there's a lot of evidence to support that. With Molly, though; who has carried this steady love for so many years – have carried Sherlock through his tragedies, has been emotional support and safety... he cannot wedge open his heart like this for the moment it takes to “save her”, only to close it once more. This is something that has ramifications for the both of them and there is every chance this forced enlightenment comes at the cost of something he wasn't given the time to figure out and act upon. In finally figuring out he loves her he may have lost her in that same breath.

If ever there is a season 5 I wonder that this would even be explored. It's hard to say. But if this is, really, the end of the show it is just as easy to see where it COULD lead.