It’s Valentine’s Day, or if you’re cynical, it’s just another Wednesday. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard the people who say things like “Valentine’s Day is just a CONSUMERIST HOLIDAY to get us to BUY THINGS! They ALL ARE!” Well, yeah, there is a lot of advertising involved. But that’s not all. The origins of Valentine’s Day are muddled at best. It started with ancient Roman fertility festivals and the killing of two saints named Valentine, and then made slightly more safe-for-work by the Pope in the 5th century as “Valentine’s Day.” Then in Shakespeare’s time, people started to exchange cards on Valentine’s day, Hallmark got in on the business, and here we are (1). Flowers, chocolate, anatomically incorrect hearts, and lots of romantic expectations.
So if this is a stupid holiday that’s only about buying things, then why has it persisted? Why do we still show extra affection every February 14th?
Putting aside cynicism, it’s because humans are social animals who form special relationships first as a means of staying alive and then just because it’s nice to have someone who has your back and laughs at your jokes. People find different kinds of love and closeness, whether it’s with a boyfriend or girlfriend, a family (chosen or born into), or just some really good friends, or a dog. They’re all important relationships, and they’re what makes us human.
So, in celebration of this important holiday, here are some good romantic movies.
Love Actually
Love Actually is a movie that centers around a few different intertwining storylines, of different people falling in or out of love. Martin Freeman plays an endearingly awkward pornstar (it’s more awkward and less nsfw than it sounds), Alan Rickman plays a guy who cheats on my favorite character and I’ll never forgive him, and Hugh Grant plays the Prime Minister of England. It’s a good movie. It is set around Christmas, but fight me: it’s a good, romantic, sappy movie and it belongs on this list.
Two Weeks Notice
In some ways, this is a formula rom-com: guy meets girl under funny circumstances, they fall in love. However, tropes are tropes because they’re true, and in Two Weeks Notice we follow two lawyers who manage to find true love. Lucy (played by Sandra Bullock) is an environmental lawyer, George is a bigshot lawyer with no morals, and she ends up working in his office. This leads to character development, hijinks, and a happy ending.
Moonstruck
Moonstruck is a romantic comedy from the 80s (or so) starring Cher and Nicolas Cage, before either of them were household memes. The acting is a little stilted, and it’s a very 80s movie, but the story (woman falls in love with the brother of the man she’s reluctantly engaged to) is sweet. Throw in her Italian family of busybodies, some family secrets, and his moral issues about how she’s engaged to his brother combining with his trauma surrounding losing a hand, and you have a really good movie. I eventually got over my meme associations with Nicolas Cage.
Big Eden
Big Eden is the story of what happens when Henry, a gay man who left his rural hometown for NYC, comes back to care for his father after a stroke. He comes back to a town full the type of people who my dad would refer to as “a character.” Surprisingly, this movie doesn’t deal with homophobia very much. No one in the town is against Henry being gay; and in the context of the movie this seems less like a cop-out and more like a utopia. Henry has enough trouble dealing with his old flame from high school, his ailing father, and a new crush. This is a warm fuzzy movie that’s definitely not too niche for straight audiences.
The Princess Bride
I know, most people have seen this movie. Some can recite all the dialogue as it happens in the movie. But the Princess Bride deserves a place on the list, because it’s a fairytale about the power of love, and it also has highly amusing sidekicks and side-plots. Inigo and Fezzik are still my favorites. The small boy whose grandpa reads him the story is funny, asking if this is a “kissing book” and being highly skeptical of romance. This movie has enough romance to be sweet and enough sword fights to be really fun.
50 First Dates
This movie was one I saw on the recommendation of Benji, and it is here because it’s an adorable concept. Girl gets amnesia in a car wreck, guy tries to date her and has to work around her amnesia- eventually she remembers him in dreams enough to remember him every day. Pseudo-neuroscience aside, it’s a cute movie. Adam Sandler looks like a golf dad, but it’s a cute movie. It’s set in Hawaii. What more could you want?
10 Things I Hate About You
Wow, early 2000s teen romcoms! The best thing ever! Seriously though, 10 Things is a good movie. It’s fun, it’s witty, and it has Heath Ledger in it. Kat and Patrick start out as strangers, then he’s secretly paid to date her- but she’s never dated anyone, and doesn’t plan to. Teen drama makes everything convoluted, and then this movie (based very loosely on The Taming Of The Shrew) ends with an emotional sonnet (ish. the iambic pentameter isn’t quite there) by Kat.
The Way He Looks
Another teen movie, this one more recent. The title of this movie is a slight joke: one of the main characters, Leo, is blind. The film is in Portuguese, but it’s easy to understand with subtitles. Leo is a blind high schooler who relies on his parents and his friend Guiliana. Leo wants to be independent and travel the world, but his parents are scared. A new boy named Gabriel comes to his school, and Leo becomes friends with him, and eventually they fall in love. They always did say love was blind, and here it’s more literal.
Letters to Juliet
This movie starts out with a romantic premise that works best in pre-internet days: the letters to Juliet mentioned in the title are paper letters stuck into the cracks of a wall in Verona, Italy that is locally famous as the wall beneath Juliet’s balcony. Nevermind that Juliet is a fictional character, people stick letters into the wall and hope for either an “answer from Juliet” or for some other lovelorn fool to pick their letter out of the wall and reply. Sophie, the main character, finds a letter in the wall from Claire Smith, asking Juliet for advice. Sophie replies to Claire, and agrees to help her look for Lorenzo, her long-lost love. This results in a road trip across picturesque Italy with octogenarian Claire and her handsome son Charlie. No spoilers, but you just know Sophie and Charlie are probably going to get together. This movie is easy to scoff at for its premise, but if you let go of that, it’s pretty adorable.
Honorable mention romcoms we have no time for here: The Proposal, Hitch, But I’m a Cheerleader, and I Love You Phillip Morris.
You can also check out a more in-depth look at the origins of Valentine’s day mentioned in this NPR article: https://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133693152/the-dark-origins-of-valentines-day