It’s Valentine’s Day, and you can’t avoid the stench of cheap chocolates, smelly flowers, and desperation in the air. So let’s embrace it.
What is the most romantic movie ever? What do you think movies tend to get the most wrong about romance, and does your most-romantic movie deal with that aspect well?
My pick — Casablanca — is my pick because it confronts head on one thing I feel movies often get wrong: they depict romances that don’t feel like they’re occurring between adults, even when the characters are ostensibly grownups. That’s not the case in Casablanca, where the romance between Rick and Ilsa doesn’t happen in a selfish vacuum that locks out all other concern. For some that might ruin the fantasy of the romance itself, but for me, the fact that romance can still exist, even if it is thwarted in the end, within the real world is so much more romantic than pretending, as so many movies do, that romance is such a delicate, fragile creature that it requires the freedom of total fantasy in order to blossom.
Your turn…
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTD sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
