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Page 1 of 4 The popular stance for men to take is to hate Valentine’s Day. Hell, I know women who talk smack about it. I hear a lot about how it is a holiday made up by the card companies, and blah blah blah. Similar arguments are made about every other holiday, and they are all specious: I mean, all holidays were made up out of thin air, if you look back far enough. Single people hate VD because it reminds them that they are alone, and while I understand it, no one is forcing them to celebrate, so they can feel free to shut up. Men in relationships who hate it do so because a) they don’t like their significant other or b) they are tired of a SO who treats it as “Give a Woman a Gift” Day (which is probably also the reason some women hate it: they feel it makes them all look like high maintenance harpies). I happen to be in a relationship in which we celebrate our love for each other every day, and enjoy VD as a day when we get to be extra mushy...
and make the people around us puke even more than usual. Also, any holiday that involves getting candy can’t be all bad. Of course, I am not here to be your Dr. Phil. This site, like 95% of my personality, is devoted to movies, and that is what I am going to talk to you about. If you have known me for more than five seconds, then you know that I hate romantic comedies. I try to take every movie on its own merits, but the standard “romcom” is just so formulaic: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, everyone learns a lesson, and much shagging is had. It’s like magnetic poetry: just shuffle the location, love triangle elements, and various quirky best friends around on the giant studio refrigerator, get Nora Roberts to write the screenplay, Joel Schumacher to direct it, and find a place to shim in Hugh Grant, and you’re guaranteed to at least break even. To paraphrase the inglorious basterd Henry Rollins, it’s like being on a roller coaster that you have been on a million times before. There ain’t a goddamn minute where you don’t know exactly what is coming, but you do it anyway just to say you did. Well, funk that noise, I say. Let’s change things up a little this year, and try to watch a better class of romantic movie. This is not a scientific list, nor are the films in any particular order. They are mostly horror, though that was not by design. I pretty much just write as stuff comes into my head. I bet you couldn’t tell. Anyway: | 1. Braindead (Dead-Alive): I’m going to go ahead and start this list off properly, with Peter Jackson’s epic, gore-laden love story of lonely, lily-white Lionel, mama’s boy extraordinaire, and the caramel-skinned, Maori extrovert Paquita. Their romantic tryst is tested under the weight of Lionel’s stunted emotional growth, due to his domineering mother and his dear departed daddy issues, his money-grubbing prick of an uncle, and of course the teeming horde of reanimated corpses bent on eating the warm, live flesh of anyone they can sink their rotting teeth into. This film is glorious for its abundant, cartoonish gore, but if you can peel back the surface (pardon the pun) you will find all of the fantastic filmmaking flourishes that have gone on to win Jackson several Oscars. The fact of the matter is, it is a more effective horror film than others because the romance aspect is just as visceral and affecting as the amputations and flayings. |  Click the picture to purchase this movie. |
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