Dream a Little

Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.

                  Peter Gabriel, Here Comes the Flood

Happy Valentine’s Day dreamers of the World! Film is still the great escape. Don’t forget these great romances the dream machine has churned out (with a piece of the script)! They’ll all go well with your favorite red wine tonight.

 

Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet: After what you've done for Lydia and, I suspect, for Jane, it is I who should be making amends.

Mr. Darcy: You must know. Surely you must know it was all for you.

You are too generous to trifle with me. You spoke with my aunt last night and it has taught me to hope as I'd scarcely allowed myself before.

If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes have not changed. But one word from you will silence me forever. If, however, your feelings have changed...I would have to tell you, you have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love...I love... I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on.

--So many versions of this great Jane Austen romance, but I recommend director Joe Wright’s 2005 film with Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen (above),and the great Brenda Blethyn and Donald Sutherland.

 

Notorious

Devlin: Try to sit up.

Alicia: Yes. Oh, Dev. I'm afraid... I can't make it because they gave me pills to sleep.             

Devlin: Keep awake. Keep talking.

Alicia: Yes. They didn't want the others to know about me.

Devlin: Keep talking. Go on. What happened? What happened?

Alicia: Alex found out.               

Devlin: And the others haven't?

Alicia: They'd kill him if they knew. They killed Emil.             

Devlin: Are you in pain?

Alicia: I don't know. The pills. … Say it again. It keeps me awake.

Devlin: I love you.              

--Cary Grant’s most noted romantic movie is An Affair to Remember with Deborah Kerr, but I've always felt that the intensity of the love affair is so much stronger in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, 1946, starring Grant and the amazing Ingrid Bergman (also more known for her other romantic movie Casablanca). There is love here, but also suspense in this movie about spying on Nazi’s in South America.

 

Some Kind of Wonderful

Keith: I love you. … I’m sorry, I didn't know.

Watts: You’re stupid. I always knew you were stupid.

Keith: You never told me.

Watts: You never asked.

He pulls away from him. He opens her hand and puts the diamond studs in her palm. She looks up at him with a huge smile.

Watts: I wanted these. I wanted ‘em.

Keith: They’re yours.

--Based on a John Hughes screenplay and directed by Howard Deutch this 1987 movie starts Mary Stuart Masterson, Lea Thompson and Eric Stoltz and gets the right kind of wonderful on friends that fall in love.

 

The Last of the Mohicans

Hawkeye: Will you go back to England?

Cora: I have nothing to go back for.

Long pause.

Hawkeye: Then will you stay in America?

She turns to face him.

Hawkeye: And will you be my wife?

Pause.

Cora: Yes.

They hold each other's eyes. She searches his face.

Cora: Where will we go?

Hawkeye: Winter with the Delaware, my father's cousins. And in the spring, cross the Ohio and look for land to settle with my father in a new place called Can-tuck-ee.

--Romance during the French and Indian War isn't something you’d think of as romantic, but with Daniel Day-Lewis as leading man to Madeleine Stowe, this 1992 Michael Mann movie is worth watching as much for the romance as for the story.

Strange Days

Mace: Looks like we made it, Lenny.

Lenny starts to grin.  He taps Strickland on the shoulder and signals for him to stop.  All around them people begin to shout the countdown to midnight.

CROWD: TEN!  NINE!  EIGHT!...

Lenny shouts with them.

Lenny (AND CROWD): SEVEN!  SIX!  FIVE!...

Mace grins at him and starts to chant too.

Mace:  FOUR!  THREE!  TWO!  ONE!  HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

The exultation of the moment flows through them as they lift their voice with the crowd in a great cheer. Balloons are released, confetti and streamers fly in a blizzard.  Couples grab each other and kiss passionately. Lenny sees all these people around him kissing. He and Mace look at each other.  It floods through Lenny's brain like a burst of fireworks.  Nothing ever felt more right. He grabs her and plants one on her like in the movies. She grabs his head and won't let him break even if he wanted to, which he doesn't.

--Directed by Kathryn Bigelow on a screenplay by James Cameron, this 1995 movie stars Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett as cop and former cop uncovering a police conspiracy in the not-to-distant future and falling in love in the process.

 

The Long Hot Summer

So you run, and you keep on runnin'...and you buy yourself a bus ticket and you disappear. And you change your name and you dye your hair...and maybe... just maybe...you might be safe from me.

--Directed by Martin Ritt based on stories by William Faulkner the movie stars the real life couple  Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and also  Orson Welles. Remade as a TV movie in 1985 with Don Johnson, Judy Ivy and Jason Robards, they are both good, romantic watches.

 

Silver Linings Playbook

Tiffany:  (Reading)"Dear Tiffany...

 She stops, surprised it is addressed to her.

Tiffany (Continues reading): "...I know you wrote the letter (long pause) The only way you could           meet my crazy...."

Pat: (RECITING) "...was by doing something crazy yourself. Thank you. I love you. I knew it the minute I met you. I'm sorry it took so long for me to catch up. I just got stuck. Pat." I wrote that a week ago.

Tiffany: You wrote that a week ago?

 Pat: Yes, I did.

Tiffany: You let me lie to you for a week?

Pat: I was trying to be romantic.

Tiffany: You love me?

Pat: Yeah, I do.

Tiffany: Okay.

She leans forward and kisses him, they kiss. Camera pulls away. Score comes in.

--I had to include a more recent romance, though it seems they get harder to come by in this time of dating apps -where people can be “swiped-away” as fast as flying, angry birds-, friends come “with benefits” (for the guys), and bromances  somehow seem to be stronger than romances. This 2012 movie by director David O. Russell has managed to capture romance of the old fashioned kind.

Drink up!