Is romance dead? David Carr seems to think so, at least in American cinema (both Hollywood and “Indiewood,” as he inclusively clarifies). While celebrating the subway station meet-cute from the beginning of Milk, a scene he claims to be of an increasingly rare sort, Carr states that American filmmakers “can do romantic pathology and entropy, but the kind of love for the ages, a big-movie kind of love? Not so much.”
If you agree with him, blame the back-to-back Best Picture winners Titanic and Shakespeare in Love for feeding us the kind of romance that’s so cheesy it clogs our arteries and gives us a coronary. Left with a burst heart and a lack of quality Nora Ephron movies, most of us have been cynics when it comes to love stories these past ten years. Yet cynics can still be swept off their feet, and American filmmakers have adequately supplied them with new kinds of love for the ages.
Just take a look at these ten films from the past decade. They may be full of cynicism, but they’re also filled with big-movie love, in their own way. If you can’t see the romance, then the problem is with you, not the movies.
Do you remember 2005, when Miranda July was blogging and making those bittersweet video diaries from the road whilst promotingMe and You and Everyone We Know? Remember how she filmed her walk up the red carpet at the Cannes, and it seemed so quirky and novel and maybe even a teeny tiny bit punk rock for a Portland-based video artist to be taking home movies from the Croisette whilst wearing borrowed Dior? Do you remember that things like that used to be special, because YouTube didn’t used to exist?
It looks like she’s back at it. A YouTube account was created 17 hours ago (as of this writing) under the name mjsecretary. The first video, embedded above, shows July in what I assume is her own kitchen, putting together a cardboard display stand for her book, No One Belongs Here More Than You. She has a conversation with the woman holding the camera about trading t-shirts. Then July pretends the cardboard stand, which is almost as big as her, is a purse.
You know… it’s cute. But three years on the internet is at least a decade in real time (this is why I feel like I’m actually 50 years old, even though my birth certificate says otherwise), and since July last dabbled in this field, the bar has been raised. I loved her Me and You festival videos, even though I wasn’t totally in the tank for the movie itself. More like that, please.
The Thing is a new project out of the Bay Area, through which four filmmakers, artists and musicians a year will create art works, which will then distributed to subscribers on a quarterly basis. The artists are held to two rules: each piece must be based on an “every day object”, and each art work must incorporate text. Each project is reproduced by hand, and then mailed to subscribers, who pay $160/year for all four works, including shipping.
The first Thing, a set of window shades emblazoned with hand-painted disclaimers and pleas, comes from the mind of filmmaker/performance artist . There’s photo documentation of the Thing crew painting and preparing the shades for shipping here, and for more information on subscriptions, go here.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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