Werthwhile Valentine's Weekend!

Ah, Valentine's Day! The day where lovers share their enduring amore and various chocolates, and single people go on Tinder or Grindr to find next year's valentine.
Sadly, my main squeeze and I won't be able to share the day together, so if you, like me, are going to have to get your warm, fuzzy feelings from the big screen, here are some classic movie ideas for you to get tender with this weekend.

BAM is showing Sabrina (1954)

Love triangles are a frequent trope for the romance genre and Billy Wilder sets up a doozy in Sabrina. Linus (Humphrey Bogart) and David (William Holden) Larrabee are well-heeled brothers who couldn't be more different. Linus toils away in the boardroom of the family business while David chases fast cars and skirts. Both of their heads are turned, though, when the chaffeur's daughter Sabrina (uber gamine Audrey Hepburn) returns from school in Paris as a sophisticated young woman. Which brother will Sabrina choose? Will this girl from the wrong side of the garage ever fit into high society? Will we get to see more of William Holden's butt in the air because he keeps sitting on champagne glasses?

This movie moves and sparkles as only a Billy Wilder comedy can and the backstory is just as fun. Hepburn and Holden fell head-over-heels in love with each other during the shoot and an offscreen affair sizzled. Bogart didn't like being the odd man out, so he grumped and complained about his "untalented" co-stars. He might have also been peeved because his wife, Lauren Bacall was originally slated to play Hepburn's role.

If that's not enough Hollywood gossip for you, Hepburn had come back from a trip to Paris as a Givenchy devotee and insisted that she be dressed by the famous couturier in this film. But when the costumes for Sabrina won an Oscar, head of the Paramount costume department Edith Head accepted the award claiming that she had altered Givenchy's designs, and hence deserved the statuette. Givenchy would later say that the famous little, black cocktail dress was his design. Whether you come for the onscreen or offscreen drama, you'll fall in love with Sabrina.

Film Forum is showing Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946)

One look at the trailer for Jean Cocteau's visual masterpiece  and you will have a taste of the optical treasures awaiting you in this French classic. Cocteau's treatment of the classic folkstory is so stunning, it is as close to a live-action fairytale as you're likely to find. Wonderfully imaginative, Beauty and the Beast (or La belle et la bete if you're a Francophile) has wall candelabra made of human arms, beds that turn down themselves, and costumes that are so opulent they would make Liberace blush. The film's conflicting ideas of beauty and the grotesque are mirrored by opposing elements in the design of the film: inanimate statues that move like living people, an indoor bedroom full of vines and flora bringing the natural and the manmade into the same space, an animal that walks and talks like a man.

Cocteau isn't just pointing out the differences between what is natural and unnatural- he is blending them together. Our "manmade" concepts of beauty and goodness cannot exist separated from the natural impulse to love and desire. In the end, the beast turns into a prince, but it is only through the love of a beauty, who acted like a beast. Sounds like some of my old OK Cupid.com dates.



If staying in and watching a DVD is more your thang...

There's nothing like a good old-fashioned lesbian lovestory to warm the lonely heart. Aileen (Charlize Theron) and Selby (Christina Ricci) are two outcasts who meet cute one rainy night in a Florida gay bar. Soon the two are going on dates at the local roller rink and moving in together to escape Selby's small-minded family. All of this would make a perfect romance if it weren't for the fact that Aileen has decided to start murdering her johns in order to make enough money to buy Selby a beach house. You guessed it- the romantic movie I'm talking about is 2003 bio-pic, Monster.

This depiction of the true life story of female serial killer Aileen Wuornos is complicated. On the one hand, Aileen was sexually abused as a child and early on fell into the sex trade- unable to pull herself away from the quick money and the self-destructive male attention. Suicidal, beaten-up and nearly killed, she defends herself and shoots a customer to death. Had her story ended there, perhaps the view of Aileen could remain sympathetic. But Aileen's tendency to not live in reality mixes with her need for money and a nasty temper and soon she is murdering and robbing men as a reprisal for the misdeeds of their kind, rather than for anything they personally do to her. By the end, her murderous temper tantrums are more like those of a lost, greedy child than an avenging feminist.

Charlize Theron is astounding. It's not just that one of the world's most beautiful women went ugly for the role. She becomes Wuornos. The false teeth, dark contacts, and the makeup are merely the trappings of an actress who fully inhabits this character who loves and hates with equal vigor. Her shifts in mood are terrifying and her failed attempts to fit-in make you feel like you're watching the awkward girl in junior high trying to find a place to sit in the lunchroom. Theron deservedly took home the Oscar for this conflicted portrayal where we are asked to empathize with and condemn a monster.

While we all walk away talking about the serial killer stuff, I do think the heart of this movie is the love between Aileen and Selby- as fragile and unrealistic as it turns out to be. And isn't doomed love what Valentine's Day is all about?

So dear Wearthwhile readers, I hope you all find love this Valentine's Day- even if it's just in a movie. Happy Valentine's Day!