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Video: Rewind
Love's valentines and battle lines
[Photo: Touchstone Pictures]
Richard Gere and Julia Roberts first shared the screen in the romantic comedy Pretty Woman. |
By PHILIP BOOTH, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 13, 2003
Love, Hollywood style, is typically a many-splendored thing, a many-splintered thing, or a little of both. Here are movies that cover the range of romance, from the good to the bad to the wrongheaded. To save you a trip to the video store, we've included the times and channels for those showing on TV this weekend:
The American Film Institute's Top 20 'passionate' films of all time:
Casablanca (1942); Gone With the Wind (1939); West Side Story (1961), 6 p.m. Sunday on TCM; Roman Holiday (1953), 8 p.m. Friday on AMC; An Affair to Remember (1957); The Way We Were (1973), 4 p.m. Saturday on TCM; Doctor Zhivago (1965); It's a Wonderful Life (1946); Love Story (1970), 11:25 a.m. Friday on AMC; City Lights (1931); Annie Hall (1977), midnight Saturday on TCM; My Fair Lady (1964), 8 p.m. Saturday on BBC America; Out of Africa (1985), 9 p.m. Sunday on TCM; The African Queen (1951); Wuthering Heights (1939), noon Sunday on TCM; Singin' in the Rain (1952); Moonstruck (1987), 8 and 10 p.m. Friday on Oxygen; Vertigo (1958), 2:30 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. Sunday on Oxygen; Ghost (1990); and From Here to Eternity (1953).
America's sweetheart:
Julia Roberts paid her dues in romantic comedies, such as America's Sweethearts (2001), with Billy Crystal, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Cusack and Hank Azaria; Runaway Bride (1999) and Pretty Woman (1990), opposite Richard Gere in both; The Mexican (2001), with Brad Pitt; Notting Hill (1999), with Hugh Grant, 8:30 p.m. Saturday on WFTS-Ch. 28; My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), with Dermot Mulroney, Rupert Everett and Cameron Diaz; Something to Talk About (1995), with Dennis Quaid and Robert Duvall; and I Love Trouble (1994), with Nick Nolte.
America's other sweetheart:
Meg Ryan played it sweet and cute in Kate and Leopold (2001), with Hugh Jackman; You've Got Mail (1998) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993), 4 p.m. Sunday on TCM, both co-starring Tom Hanks; City of Angels (1998), with Nicolas Cage; French Kiss (1995), with Kevin Kline and Timothy Hutton; I.Q. (1994), with Tim Robbins and Walter Matthau; Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), also starring Hanks; and When Harry Met Sally (1989), with Billy Crystal.
Bad love, with unexpected consequences:
Diane Lane turned in one of last year's most impressive performances as a wife cheating on Richard Gere in Unfaithful. Glenn Close spooked married lover Michael Douglas and wandering husbands everywhere in Fatal Attraction (1987). Douglas does battle with a female co-worker (Demi Moore) who accuses him of sexual harassment in Disclosure (1994). Jeremy Irons brought on a fate worse than death after sleeping with his son's fiancee (Juliette Binoche) in Damage (1992).
Divorce is hell:
For proof, witness Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), and Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses (1989). Just a few of many others: Faithless (2000), An Unmarried Woman (1978), Woody Allen'sHusbands and Wives (1992) and Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage (1973).
Divorce is funny:
Robin Williams made it seem so in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and identical twins caused comic havoc in two versions of The Parent Trap: the 1961 original with Hayley Mills, Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith and the 1998 remake with Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson.
Fetishes 'R' us:
James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal engaged in sadomasochistic love games in last year's Secretary, and auto accidents served as foreplay in David Cronenberg's freaky-deaky Crash (1996), with James Spader and Holly Hunter. Spader, too, dealt with unusual dysfunctions in Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989).
Forbidden love, man-girl division:
Jeremy Irons was terrific in Adrian Lyne's dark 1997 take on Nabokov's once-controversial novel Lolita, but I'll still take the lighter, funnier 1962 Stanley Kubrick version, with James Mason as Humbert Humbert, Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty and other characters, Sue Lyon as the title character and, as her annoying mom, Shelley Winters.
Forbidden love, woman-boy division:
It's a hot topic these days, as evidenced by the recent Tadpole, with Sigourney Weaver, young Aaron Stanford, John Ritter and a show-stealing Bebe Neuwirth; Crush, with Andie MacDowell; Lovely and Amazing; and Y Tu Mama Tambien. The Graduate (1967), Summer of '42 (1971) and Class (1983) were among the earlier entries in this category. And, lest we forget, septuagenarian Ruth Gordon was the constant companion of 20-year-old Bud Cort in Harold and Maude (1971).
He's a she/She's a he, etc.:
Sexual identity surprises were in store for smitten characters in Boys Don't Cry (1999), The Crying Game (1992) and 1982's Victor/Victoria and Tootsie.
It's all talk:
An American boy (Ethan Hawke) and a French graduate student (Julie Delpy) met on a train and stayed up all night in Vienna, walking and talking, in Before Sunrise (1995).
Love from the inside of a bottle:
Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick drank like there was no tomorrow in Days of Wine and Roses (1962), as did Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway in Barfly (1987), and Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in the same year's Ironweed.
Puppy love:
In A Little Romance (1979), an American girl (Diane Lane), at school in Paris, falls in love with a French boy, and their romance is abetted by a grandfatherly friend (Laurence Olivier). 8 a.m. Sunday on TCM.
Young love:
Shipwrecked kids Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins leave childhood games behind in The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Shields falls for a teenage boy in the worst way in Endless Love (1981).
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