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.
