Valentine's - Before Sunset

Team Experience is citing favorite love scenes. Here's Chris...

Richard Linklater's Before... trilogy is the perfect love story for the hopeless-romantic-turned-cynic in all of us. The romance between Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy giving their flawless best) is the kind of pure human connection that we hope for in adulthood, and only the tiniest bit of the fairy tale we're promised in youth. Each of the series' three chapters were released nine years after its predecessor, with the years in between a surprise for the audience. [more...]

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Valentine's - (500) Days of Summer

We're celebrating Valentine's Day this week with odes to some of our favorite romantic movie moments. First, here's Murtada on the musical number in (500) Days of Summer.

The first time with the person you love. It's all what you’ve dreamed it would be. The next morning you wake up giddy, but …what to do. Why of course dance to Hall and Oates' "You Make My Dreams Come True" on your way to work, with the whole world as your own chorus, marching band and fan mob rolled into one. That’s what happens to Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt) after Summer (Zooey Deschanel) rocks his world.

What a show-off! Maybe even a braggart. Gordon Levitt gets congratulated by everyone he passes and literally scores a goal. Yet somehow it’s not off putting but utterly charming. Part of that is due to the character and the performance. Most of the appeal though is because we’ve all wanted to share our exuberance with the whole world after a particularly lovey dovey moment. Or you know right after the first time with a new love.

The scene becomes a delightful expression of the exhilaration of love. Blending dancing, animation and cultural refrences (Hello Han Solo!), it also comes at exactly the right time in the story, elevating the stakes and making - spoiler alert - the eventual heartbreak even more painful.

Happy Valentine’s

What are some of your favorite romantic musical numbers? And do you forgive (500) Days of Summer for bringing Chloe Grace Moretz into our lives?

Love Scenes: An Ode to St. Valentine

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here, providing one more love scene to close out Valentine's Day.

The opening credits sequence of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock takes place, fittingly enough, exactly 111 years ago. To the tune of Gheorghe Zamfir's doleful panpipe, the pupils of Appleyard College in late-Victorian Australia rush around, preparing for their Valentine's Day excursion—washing their faces, tying on corsets, brushing their hair, and in one special case, declaring their undying love through poetry.

The poet is Sara (Margaret Nelson), an introverted orphan who feels a deep but ill-fated love for her achingly beautiful classmate Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), a girl later compared by a teacher to "a Botticelli angel." Sara's affections may be obsessive and naïve, most likely stemming from both her loneliness and the lure of Miranda's divine, ethereal beauty, but they manifest themselves in a long, painfully sincere poem she calls "An Ode to St. Valentine," which contains lines like these:

I love thee not because thou art fair,
softer than down, smoother than air,
nor for the cupids that do lie
in either corner of thine eye.
Wouldst thou then know what it might be?
'Tis I love thee 'cause thou lovest me.

Miranda reads it aloud from a card while Sara gazes out into space and swoons. Then, as the morning progresses, Russell Boyd's camera drifts around the girls' rooms, across a sea of blond hair and white nightgowns. It's an entrancing sequence that, by focusing so heavily on Sara's intense, unreciprocated love, sets up the longing and anguished curiosity that drive the film after Miranda and three other girls disappear at Hanging Rock.

Poor Sara never has a chance. Miranda is just too mystical and airy of a creature to stay in this world, and Sara never learns to follow her instructions: "You must learn to love someone else apart from me, Sara. I won't be here much longer." She waves Miranda goodbye as the carriage drives off and never sees her again, then spends the rest of the film pining for her before meeting a tragic fate.

But Sara, in that quiet, wispy opening sequence, is still there to remind us of what love can be like in adolescence, before we're mature enough to know what's wise or appropriate. She may not be mature and she may not be a great poet, but at the very least, Sara is a romantic.

'Bright Star' and Love's Cool Breeze

Kurt here from Your Movie Buddy, ready to spread a little love on Valentine's Day.

The dreamy feeling one gets while watching Jane Campion's Bright Star is encapsulated in two successive images in the film, both of which are included at the end of this post. But WAIT!! Don't scroll down yet!! There's still plenty to say about this gorgeous telling of the romance between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and poet's muse Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). It's by far 2009's finest love story and by leaps its most beautiful movie.

I haven't exactly chosen a Valentine's Day love scene – as per Nathaniel's instructions to his contributors – though I could've easily devoted a few hundred words to the tender, sexless sex scene that caps the lovers' fleeting fling (just as I could have devoted a few thousand to the absurdity of Cornish's near-universal snubbing in the '09 awards race). What I picked is the exquisite sequence that shows the spark of the pair's courtship.

It begins with a frozen-in-time tableau that, among other things, brings to life Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte. 

It's the morning after a ballroom event, where Fanny first introduced Keats to the extents of both her fashion sense and her pseudo-feminist pluck. Fanny's young sister, Toots (Edie Martin), wants to play on the swing, which is just as well, since Fanny and Keats have plans of their own. They stroll along a planked path that bisects an ocean of reeds, and Campion all but lets you feel the plants brush across your cheek. Each lover catches the other catching a glimpse in that playful way that anyone who's ever been crush-struck can recognize.

They set down on a grassy patch in the woods, where Keats tells Fanny of a dream he had the night before in which his lips were attached to those of a beautiful figure. “Were they my lips?” Fanny asks with characteristic forwardness. And with that, we ease into the couple's first kiss, which Campion deftly delays for maximum effect.

Of course, what Campion does throughout Bright Star is create her own kind of poetry. She renders a timeless romance with lyrical beauty, not to mention visually translate the oft-unfilmable writer's process with remarkable, graceful success. Her movie is across-the-board romantic, giving a great deal of weight to an under-documented love story, using the classically sexy device of love letters as vessels of longing and joy, and enveloping you in the uncluttered comfort of nature.

The first kiss is followed by three wondrous, indelible shots, in which Fanny and Keats share their newfound glee in love, then revel in it individuallly. Playful and unbroken, the first sees them freeze in place and play it cool (three times) as Toots glances back to catch them mid-smooch.

The second, set in Fanny's bedroom, and the third, atop a flowery tree, illustrate the very sensation this whole movie creates – that of a smooth breeze that bowls you over...

...and leaves you in bliss.

Let these stills settle in, then tell me: were you as taken with Bright Star as I was?

Love Scenes: Light me Up.

Jose here. With Valentine's Day just around the corner, Nathaniel asked us to share our favorite love scenes. I'm not really big on V-Day itself. I just don't get it. So I tried to think of the feeling in a "bigger" way, something a bit out of the box if you may call it that, so without further ado, here's one of my favorite love scenes of all time.

Be warned...spoilers ahead! 

Double Indemnity is highly regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made. When it premiered a lot was made about the fact that it dealt with sex in such a blunt way, how Walter Neff's (Fred McMurray) passion for married femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (the fantastic Barbara Stanwyck) leads them to crime and mutual destruction.

The love affair between Phyllis and Walter is volatile and incredibly sexy but my favorite 'love scene' in the film takes place with two guys. Throughout the film we see the fascinating relationship between Walter and his boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). They both work for an insurance company. When Walter gets involved with Phyllis, little does Barton suspect that they're double crossing him. In a way then Double Indemnity deals not only with Phyllis' infidelity but also with Walter's.

The entire film, which is told in flashback, contains Walter's confession to the man he, well, loves. In a way this framing device could pair this film quite nicely with Brief Encounter (I'll leave for you to decide which one's more tragic).

In the film's final scene, a gunshot wounded Walter has finished his confession and he plans to escape. given the fact that he's practically dead by then, this escape is more symbolic; an atonement of sorts. A running gag during the film has Walter lighting up Barton's cigars (the man never seems to have a match on him). In one of these moments an angry Barton looks for a match desperately while discussing a case with Walter. He then proceeds to light him up, Barton gives him a wondrous eye and Walter simply tells him "I love you, too".

In the last scene Walter falls, about to die, and of course decides to smoke a cigarette (don't you love how much actors smoked in classic films?) He weakly looks for a match and it's only at this moment that the roles are exchanged. Barton kneels next to him and lights up his cigarette looking at him with a combination of pity, disappointment and honest to god love.

Then, the following exchange:

Walter: Know why you couldn't figure this one, Keyes? I'll tell ya. 'Cause the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk from ya. 

Barton: Closer than that Walter...

Walter: I love you too. 

It makes no difference that Stanwyck's character is long gone by this scene. The finale makes you reevaluate everything you saw. You realize that Double Indemnity is about love just as much as it's about lust.

Hollywood makes such a big deal about romantic love that we often forget fraternal, familial and other kinds of love in the movies. I might be reading too much into the moment but if this scene isn't as romantic and perfect as anything in Casablanca or West Side Story, then I don't know what love is.

Anyone else has any "alternative" fave movie scenes they wanna share? Light us up!