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Part 4 |
Romance Films Romantic Pairings in the 90s:
John Cusack romanced Ione Skye outside her window at dusk, by holding a boom box aloft playing Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes in rock reporter/director Cameron Crowe's debut film Say Anything... (1989). He also confessed: "I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen." In subsequent years, Crowe would also direct the insightful Singles (1992) about Seattle twenty-somethings searching for romance (in the film, Campbell Scott jokingly admitted to Kyra Sedgwick: "I was just nowhere near your neighborhood"). Another Crowe film was the slick comedy-romance Jerry Maguire (1996), that popularized the phrase delivered to gushing sports agent Tom Cruise by secretary/single mother Renee Zellweger: "You had me at hello." The film also popularized the phrase: "You complete me." And Almost Famous (2000), a coming-of-age romance/drama, followed a teenaged rock journalist as he pursued a rock-band story and its prime groupie Penny Lane (Kate Hudson). Jane Austen Film Adaptations: Many romance-laced period films have been adaptations of the dialogue-rich, socially-observant, and satirical novels by 19th century novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), including these appealing films and their over two dozen mini-series versions, BBC films and TV movies - not to mention stage productions. These romantic, often sexually-charged film adaptations reached a zenith in the mid-90s:
Jane Austen was the subject of a biopic from Columbia Pictures and British producer Tony Garnett titled Becoming Jane (2005), about her early life (played by Natalie Portman) and a romance with a young Irishman before she achieved fame as a writer.
In recent years, charming British romantic comedies with actor Hugh Grant have taken various shapes and forms, with the Brit: as a reserved, bumbling, and stammering 30-ish bachelor in pursuit of American Andie MacDowell after their meeting at a wedding in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); as a shy, travel bookstore owner who romances neurotic movie star Julia Roberts in Notting Hill (1999), and who is told: "I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy. Asking him to love her"; and as the dashing romantic conquest of the overweight heroine Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001). Grant also appeared in first-time screenwriter Emma Thompson's adaptation of Jane Austen's dramatic costume romance Sense and Sensibility (1995), as one of the potential husbands for three headstrong Dashwood daughters (Elinor (Emma Thompson), Marianne (Kate Winslet) and Margaret (Emilie Francois)). In Love, Actually (2003), Hugh Grant appeared as the newly-elected British Prime Minister who was competing with the US President (Billy Bob Thornton) over the affections of shapely staff secretary Natalie (former UK soap star Martine McCutcheon). Julia Roberts in 90s Romantic Comedies:
Supernatural Romantic Comedies: More recently, the top grossing film Ghost (1990) featured the enduring and passionate connection between a murdered investment consultant (Patrick Swayze) and his lover (Demi Moore) - with the memorable scene at a pottery wheel backed by the Righteous Brothers' Unchained Melody - ("Sam...I can hear you"). And Anthony Minghella directed Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) - a tale of a mourning and depressed Nina (Juliet Stevenson) for her musician lover Jamie (Alan Rickman) who suddenly and briefly was brought back as a ghost. Homosexual Love:
And Neil Jordan's surprising and controversial The Crying Game (1992) told the unexpected story of growing love between Dil (Jaye Davidson) and IRA footsoldier Fergus (Stephen Rea). Joseph Fiennes as Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare found inspiration for his famous play 'Romeo and Juliet' after loving cross-dressing beauty Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) in John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998). Best Director-winning Ang Lee's Best Picture-nominated film Brokeback Mountain (2005) was the first mainstream gay/bi-sexual romance film heavily promoted by the media, told about a secret lifelong bond and longing for forbidden love between two young men in the early-mid 1960s - ranch-hand Ennis del Mar (Oscar-nominated Heath Ledger) and rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Oscar-nominated Jake Gyllenhaal), who grew close while herding sheep in the summer on an isolated Wyoming mountain. |
the
attraction between widowed Jewish lawyer (James Spader) and older Missouri
waitress and barfly (Susan Sarandon) in the sexy White Palace (1990)
the
unfolding, 14-hour, conversational romance between two strangers who were
a perfectly-matched couple: American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and young Frenchgirl
Celine (Julie Delpy), who met on the Eurail and then explored Vienna together
before saying goodbye at a train station - in one of the most romantic of
films, director Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995); their
story was continued (nine years later) in the witty Before Sunset (2004) with the same cast of two, now older and wiser, who reunited in Paris on
a sunny afternoon - in real-time - with Jesse having only a few hours before
a flight home to New York as they begin talking again and sharing thoughts
about Life's Big Questions, with the film ending with Nina Simone singing Just in Time; the two lovers reprised their roles by appearing in
a segment of Waking Life (2001)
the
flashbacked, remembered WWII tragic, mismatched love affair of a mysterious,
disfigured plane crash survivor ("The English Patient" - Ralph
Fiennes), cared for by Canadian nurse Juliette Binoche in an Italian monastery,
with a lovely Englishwoman (Kristin Scott Thomas) in The English Patient
(1996), director Anthony Minghella's Oscar-winning romantic tearjerker;
includes the famous line: "Swoon, I'll catch you." 
Cameron
Crowe's Recent Works: 
Northanger
Abbey (1986, UK) - published in 1818; a made-for-TV BBC film, telecast
in the US as PBS' second Masterpiece Theatre presentation of the 1987-88
season
Hugh
Grant's British Romantic Comedies: 
After
her successes in Steel Magnolias (1989) and Pretty Woman (1990),
Julia Roberts found her stride with mostly light-hearted romantic comedies,
including the following: 
Supernatural
romantic comedies have featured ghostly characters, in such films as I
Married a Witch (1942), Capra's 
Heaven
Can Wait (1943) in which a roguish dandy Henry Van Cleeve tries to convince
the devil in Hell that he deserves eternal damnation, The Bishop's Wife
(1947) with Cary Grant as a heavenly angel sent into the household of
the bishop's neglected wife (Loretta Young), Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The
Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) about a cranky, former naval captain ghost
(Rex Harrison) who falls impossibly in love with the widow/occupant (Gene
Tierney) of his seaside cottage, or One Touch of Venus (1948) about
a store window statue of Venus de Milo (Ava Gardner) that comes to life for
a young department store window decorator (Robert Walker). 
Early
on, homosexuality was examined in director William Friedkin's The Boys
in the Band (1970), compared to both