Friday, February 14, 2014

Valentine's Day special: Top Period Romances

The domestic box office is packed with remakes this weekend, with updates on classic ‘80s films RoboCop, About Last Night and Endless Love all opening wide. Today, of course, is also Valentine’s Day, our nationally sanctioned date night. While many couples and groups of friends will likely celebrate the latter by viewing one of the former, given the persistence of bad weather throughout much of the country (just this morning I overheard one woman lamenting the lack of favorable conditions for appropriate V-Day shoes: How can she be expected to wear heels in so much slush?) we’re guessing there’ll be plenty of people who opt for dinner and a movie on the couch instead.


 Instead of a standard list of the best Valentine’s Day films streaming online, however, we’ve decided to take our cue from Hollywood and its current obsession with the past. Today’s batch of films is made up of the Best Period Romances. Yes, that means femme-targeted fare Gone With the Wind and the underrated A Knight’s Tale have made the cut, but so has an Adam Sandler movie, as well as a beloved animated classic neither gender should ever admit to disliking.


Grab yourself a bowl of pasta, a glass of red wine and an it’s-a-cliché-for-a-reason box of chocolates, and take a look through our list of the Top Period Romances:


The Deep Blue Sea – Available for rent on Amazon
Set in 1950, this adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play centers on depressed well-to-do British housewife Hester (Rachel Weisz) whose affair with a younger officer (Tom Hiddleston, PL, or pre-Loki) has begun to lose its luster so far as he, if not she, is concerned. We see their relationship build and then unravel through a series of flashbacks on this day Hester has chosen to take a dramatic step. It’s not the cheeriest of romances, but it’s a fabulous showcase for the two leads, and deeply romantic in the way it emphasizes the sister-half of passion: tragedy.


  


The Wedding Singer – Available for rent on Amazon
On the opposite end of the spectrum from artsy-serious The Deep Blue Sea, we have what is still Adam Sandler’s best film, The Wedding Singer. The period element comes in the form of the movie’s over-the-top 1980s setting, in which blue suits, Members Only jackets, and a preoccupation with rock stars wearing eyeliner, Boy George and Billy Idol, are as commonplace as perms. This first pairing of Sandler with Drew Barrymore is also, in the old-fashioned sense of the term, movie magic. Funny, romantic, and featuring a song rife with potential for real-life proposals, The Wedding Singer is a shoo-in for our list:


 


A Knight’s Tale – Available to buy on Amazon
Thirteen years on and this rocking riff on Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale continues to bear up. Heath Ledger plays Will, the titular knight who is, in fact, not a knight at all but a poor squire. When the real knight he serves dies, Will dons his armor in order to compete in a tournament and win some money to buy food for himself and fellow hungry squire Roland (Mark Addy). Turns out peasant Will is a natural fighter, and his success in subsequent competitions – as well as the sight of noblewoman Jocelyn (Shannyn Sossamon) – moves him to continue with his ruse. A supporting cast of characters, including Paul Bettany in what endures as one of his best supporting roles, the gambling and oft-nude Chaucer, and a gleefully anachronistic rock soundtrack help lift A Knight’s Tale above the common make of knights and damsels yarns. Fun fact: The Artist’s Berenice Bejo got her big break playing Jocelyn’s kindly abetting lady in waiting, Christiana.


 


Gone With the Wind – Available to rent on Amazon
Well, obviously. They don’t come much more romantic than Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, the blackguarded black sheep of the South. It takes a while for Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara to come to the same conclusion Gable’s Rhett Butler drew the moment he saw her descending the stairs of that dippy Ashley Wilkes’ grand estate: They were made for each other. It’s too bad her revelation comes when it does, but watching her work her way there, amid the real-life drama of the Civil War and the melodrama of author Margaret Mitchell’s plot, is a whole lot of fun:


 


Lust, Caution – Netflix
The sexiest film on our list is, unsurprisingly, a tale of espionage and betrayal. The period in question is late 1930’s and early 1940’s Hong Kong. A group of earnest university students form a covert spy cell in order to assassinate powerful government official Mr. Yee. The naïve Chia Chi is given the role of elegant society woman and tasked with seducing Mr. Yee, the better to lure him into the cell’s trap. It’s a simple enough plan, until feelings among the cell’s members and those between Chi and Mr. Yee muddy the course. Lust, Caution remains one of the best collaborations between director Ang Lee and co-writer and former Focus Features head James Schamus to date:


 


The Secret in Their Eyes – Available to buy on Amazon
This one stretches the definition of “period film,” but a great deal of the movie does take place in an earlier period, 1970s Argentina, so it qualifies. When the movie opens, retired judiciary worker Benjamin Esposito is having some trouble beginning a novel he would like to write about a rape and murder case he covered 25 years ago. He visits the offices of a former love interest and colleague who also worked on the case, now a high-powered judge, to ask for advice. She tells him, a la Maria von Trapp, to start at the beginning – a very good place to start. And so begins a series of flashbacks that reveal both the troubled nature of the criminal case and Benjamin and Irene’s relationship. The Secret in Their Eyes won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film back in 2012, and with good reason:


 


The Dead – Netflix
John Huston’s final film is an adaptation of the final tale in James Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners. The year is 1904 and Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta are attending a dinner party.  One of the guest’s rendition of the song “The Lass of Aughrim” prompts Gretta to recall certain romantic and painful memories she describes to Gabriel later that night. The Dead, as the title may suggest, is not an uplifting tale of love and passion, but a deeply affecting story imbued with director Huston’s own sense of impending mortality. We dare you not to feel something when Huston’s daughter Angelica reveals depths previously unknown to her husband:


 


Who Framed Roger Rabbit – Available for rent on Amazon
Like Scarlett and Rhett, Roger and Jessica Rabbit form a film couple for the ages. The 1947-set genre-bending live-action/animated hybrid is many things – adventure tale, crime caper, murder mystery, slapstick comedy, witty comedy, ensemble comedy – but it is, at its core, a love story. The plot’s resolution in fact hinges upon a declaration of love. Doesn’t get more romantic than that:


  


The Princess Bride – Available for rent on Amazon
Peter Falk says it best when describing The Princess Bride to his skeptic of a grandson: “Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Revenge. Giants. Monsters. Chases. Escapes. True Love. Miracles.” The film delivers on all of the above and is one of cinema’s finest examples of comedy happily wed to earnest romance. It is typical Princess Bride style to toss off lines that are equal parts facetious and worthy of a dreamy sigh: “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”


 



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