I have a hard time buying into on-screen love stories. Half of the time they are entirely unnecessary, just subplots dropped into an otherwise sort of okay film. And when they are the focus, they are seldom worth actually focusing on. Take, for instance, the films Loving Annabelle and Imagine Me & You. Anything with potential for girl-girl kissing, I am going to see, which in turn is going to leave me either disappointed or pissed off. Disappointed most of the time, pissed off much more seldom, like in the case of Femme Fatale, in which Rebecca Romijn spends the first five minutes making out with a complete hottie, and then her character proceeds to act absolutely disgusted by the woman later on, even though Rebecca Romijn was clearly the one with the bad haircut, but that’s another rant. Most of the time, it’s just disappointment. 

In the case of Loving Annabelle, let’s just say I am tired of any film that uses sex as the climax (no pun intended) of a story. If sexual tension is the entire plot of the film, where the hell was it? The sex scene was hot, I’ll admit, but if you are going to make the screen explode, I’d better see you light a fuse. And if you have to show me one character daydreaming about the other one, you probably haven’t shown me enough tension in their interactions to get the point across. And you didn’t. 

Imagine Me & You, while on the complete opposite end of the gay film spectrum, suffered sort of the same problem. At the end, when the mom asks the main character how she can be sure she’s in love because it happened so quickly, the chic responds “I knew after three seconds.” Did you? Did you really? Because it seemed to me you knew after several days and finding out that she was, in fact, gay. Now, the three second response did provide the cue for the “I’ve heard of love happening that fast. The French call it Le Flash. / They would. Bloody perverts.” exchange, but it doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t SEE love after three seconds. I barely saw it when it was held up right in front of my face an hour later. 

So, anyway, in tribute to this rant, here are the eleven movies that work for me as love stories, and the sad thing is, at least four of them weren’t meant to be love stories at all. 

 (*BEWARE* - There are spoilers below that I would be royally perturbed to read if I hadn’t seen the movie. Read at your own risk!)

1. Malena – This is hands down the most beautiful, intense love story I have ever seen. It is unrequited, but it is so fucking powerful. They do use fantasy sequences, but in a clever way and only for artistic value, and it’s the things that the boy does outside of those fantasy scenes that demonstrate the strength of his feelings.

2. Matilda – So I’m going to whatever your idea of hell is for this, but I don’t care. Mutual affection has never been so transparent, and from the get go, as it is in this movie. It’s the way their eyes dance when they look at each other, the vehemence in Miss Honey’s proclamation when she says she loves Matilda. She may have adopted her at film’s end, but someday Matilda is going to grow up and Miss Honey is going to realize that she isn’t *really* her mother.

3. Love and Sex – Wow! A romantic comedy that I actually accept as a romantic comedy. With anyone else, I’m not sure it would have been much greater than the tripe that Hollywood produces left and right in this genre, but Famke Janssen and Jon Favreau made this movie freaking great. Of course, some of the genius is actually in the comedy.

“Two guys walk into a bar. One is a thirty-year-old stand-up comedian who lives with his mother.” 

4. Brokedown Palace – It doesn’t matter what comes before it, and this movie has both its high and low points leading up to the finale, but in the end, when Alice gets down on her knees and begs to serve both her time and Darlene’s, that is what love looks like.

5. Fingersmith – Ah, love is complicated, isn’t it? Especially in a time when propriety and expectation ruled even more so than today, and twice as much when you are trying so hard to double cross each other to meet your own means and you still can’t fight it.

6. Get Real – It’s high school romance for sure, but it is romantic, and when those two very pretty boys are kissing in the pool at night, I almost wish I were a gay man.

7. Fire – There are kisses. There’s a sex scene. They are nice, but completely extraneous. When Radha breaks all tradition to let Sita have a sip of water, that’s all we need to see. Don’t let it escape your awareness that she lets her sip from her own glass, so that if it someone were to notice, it would be Radha who takes the fall.

8. The Movie Hero – Though technically the relationship isn’t the focus of the plot here, it’s so essential, and so much the best part, that it’s pretty much a love story. It’s the quirky courtship that makes this work so well.

And I am always grateful when Dina Meyer is in anything that I don’t have to drink to get through. (I have sat through more bloody drivel for her…) 

9. The Princess Bride - There are a whole lot of things that make this film work, but if we weren’t rooting for Westley and Buttercup, none of them would matter. But how could we not? Is[n’t] this a kissing book?

10. Run Lola Run – So it’s a sort of real time, experimental action film. And yet… Anyone who would go through all of this shit for another person must really be in love. The scenes where they lie in bed talking are some of the most romantic moments on film.

11. School for Seduction – I know. It sounds like Jenna Jameson should be the star in this one. Well, she isn’t. It’s a little English film about an “Italian” woman who teaches English women how to be seductive. The two main women in the film develop a friendship that, if you squint your eyes not too hard and give a half smile, looks like an awful lot more.