“Romantic” Movies

One of the things that Hermione and I love to do together is watch movies. We’re both pretty fair movie buffs. Not necessarily the biggest movie buffs out there, but we’ve seen a bunch and we watch a bunch. For example, I’ve rated almost 1200 movies on NetFlix, and those are just the ones that I a) bothered to rate and b) remembered well enough to give an honest rating. Hey, we like movies.

Being movie buffs has been hard lately, though. Some years are good years for movies. Other years not so good. The last two or three years? Outside of superhero movies, frankly, not so good. And inside the genre of superhero movies, it’s still only been hit and miss. Not that there haven’t been some occasional good movies – and a handful of really good ones. But overall, there’s been a bunch of crap.

On top of that, renting decent movies has gotten a lot tougher. As far as we can tell, there’s exactly one video rental store left in town – and it’s roughly a 30 minute drive from our apartment.

Oh, sure – we watch plenty of stuff on NetFlix streaming. We also use the Zune store on our X-Box to rent movies. We’ve also tried other internet movie services. Hulu Plus was kind of a bust for us – nothing worth watching (by our tastes) that we didn’t already have access to. We haven’t done much with Amazon streaming yet because we don’t have a good way to hook it up to our TV, but I plan to fix that this fall. Yes, it seems that there are plenty of automated DVD rental machines at every grocery store these days. And yes, we have access to Pay-Per-View through our cable provider.

But both of these solutions have the same problem: the selection is mostly limited to newer films. Cable PPV and Zune on the X-Box get us most of the new blockbuster films. NetFlix and Zune get most of the newer non-blockbuster films fairly quickly. But the back-catalogs of both NetFlix and Zune are very spotty – lots of stuff (good, bad and mediocre), but also lots of holes in the selection.

Point… point… there was a point here somewhere. Oh yes.

Lately we’ve been in a bit of a movie slump. Not much has been coming out for the last 2-3 years that we’re super interested in seeing. And since our easy “rental” options are mostly newer films, that means that there’s not much in the rental bins that’s worth watching, either. And we’re not terribly keen on paying $15-30 to buy a movie we’re not likely to watch again anytime soon (much less to clutter up our small apartment with it).

But for our anniversary this week, we tried pretty hard to find something romantic worth watching together. We spent a good bit of time combing through the “Romantic” movies sections of all our available options together.

And the options were bad. Much worse than the general movie options, frankly. Almost every film we looked at could be fit into one of the following categories:

• Woman isn’t happy with her husband/boyfriend and finds a much better relationship with the guy she’s sleeping with on the side.
• Spoiled American Princess is waiting for mister-too-perfect-to-be-real to show up and sweep her off her feet.
• Woman skanks it up on vacation, in college, or for no particular reason at all.
• Woman is pregnant, doesn’t know who the father is.
• The one night stand.

How are these romance? Sexy? Perhaps for some people. They may not be my thing, but I can at least get that. But romantic? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

So here we are on our anniversary, and all we really want is a halfway decent movie that involves a couple that actually stays faithful to each other and ends happily ever after. Maybe a little humor would be good, too, with a little bit of sexiness thrown in. You know, something worthy of an anniversary. So sue us – we’re not looking for anything deep this time. And the few that we can find, we’ve already seen a dozen times.

Seriously, what the hell?