Fardreamer Dreams Up a List of the Best Romantic Movies Review

Love.

We've all heard the cliches: Love makes the world 'round, love is a many splendored thing, love conquers all, and all the other sayings and taglines that have been used to get audiences to buy movie tickets or rent videos/DVDs/Blu-rays and watch movies that show the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of love, romance, desire, and yes, even star-cross'd lovers who endure the agony and the ecstasy of affairs of the heart.

As a child, and even into my early teens, I tended to avoid romantic films as if they were coated in masculinity-killing radioactivity. Back then, even though I did have a childhood girlfriend and liked kissing and holding hands with her, I would drop everything to watch John Wayne's The Green Berets rather than sit down to watch, say, Humphrey Bogart go through the angst of seeing Ingrid Bergman in the Cafe Americain in Casablanca. It wasn't, or so I thought at the time, the sort of thing real boys watched, no matter if one liked girls a hell of a lot.

I'm not sure if it was post-adolescent maturity or a finer appreciation of the role that movie love stories play in our lives that got me to change my attitudes about the genre. After all,  some, if not most of us, consciously or unconsciously pick up notions of romance and love from the movies, and perhaps even channel or mimic behavior we see in such flicks as The Way We Were, Gone With the Wind, An Affair to Remember, Love Story, When Harry Met Sally...., You've Got Mail, and the like. Sometimes they present idealized situations that reflect who we want to be, and sometimes, regrettably, they sometimes reflect heartbreaking situations we've been in.

Or perhaps it was my rather long "relationship drought" that made me more amenable to the movies with "mushy" stuff. I was 14 when I lost my first girlfriend to another guy, and even though I wasn't exactly passive about wooing girls, it wouldn't be till I was 36 that I'd have a romantic relationship - a sad one straight out of 1961's Back Street, albeit with the gender roles reversed, with me in the unhappy role of the "other guy" in a complicated situation.

Whatever the reason, even though I still like action-adventures and fantasy films (I'm a veritable Walter Mitty kind of guy), I now watch romantic movies a bit more often, though I tend to watch those that are more guy-oriented than the more prevalent "chick flicks."

So,without further ado and in no particular order or ranking, here are my favorite romantic films...