Lasso the Moon: A Cinephile's Top Ten Love Movie List

Yes, yes. Valentines shmalentines. But I've given in.

According to bestlovemovies.com (a good url for those aiming to climb the old google rankings), the best six are, in order: Titanic, The Notebook, Pearl Harbor, 50 First Dates, Pretty Woman and Twilight.

Need I even comment? Need I even cry, or possibly wretch, all over my computer screen? And I even enjoyed a couple of those titles. But The Notebook? Pearl Harbor? Why must love stories inspire such cheese? Now, to be fair, you can find a solid, if predictably rather dated love movie list according to the folks at AFI. The top ten in their long list of love movies don't, however, include a flick more recent than 1973. Yikes!

Thus my hopefully up-to-date but not cheese-ball list. Cause a great love story need not be a piece of crap movie. 

Note: these aren't necessarily comedies (in fact only three are), they certainly don't all have Cinderella endings and one of them is even usually described as a baseball movie (albeit one of the two best baseball movies ever).

Happy Hallmark Greeting Card holiday.

My Top Ten Picks for Best Love Movie

1. It's a Wonderful Life
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. In the Mood for Love
4. Never Let Me Go
5. High Fidelity
6. Breakfast at Tiffany's
7. Bull Durham
8. Casablanca
9. Sliding Doors
10. When Harry Met Sally

This Week's "Music to Read By" Soundtrack

The first two songs in my updated playlist [see left panel; press play] are from movies. I thought they deserved a few words mention.

The first is Yo Yo Ma doing a version of "Gabriel's Oboe" from the film The Mission (1986).  The movie, starring Roberto DeNiro and Jeremy Irons, may have won the Palme d'Or and the Oscar for best cinematography, but for many it's Ennio Morricone's soundtrack that is the most memorable aspect of the film. Morricone, who has composed and arranged film scores for films as varied as The Untouchables and Cinema Paradiso, became famous scoring spaghetti westerns (40 of them) including The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. (If Clint Eastwood starred in it and you can whistle the music from it, Ennio Morricone composed it.)

The second song, "Yumeji's Theme" by Shigeru Umebayashi, was made famous in Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's film, In the Mood For Love (2000). If I were taking movies to my desert island, for the photography and music alone, In the Mood for Love would come with.