Top Five Rom-Coms That Live Rent-Free in My Nervous System
Romantic comedy's that you might not know but might change how you see love
I don’t remember when I started measuring time in movies instead of years, but at some point, that’s what happened. Relationships dissolved, cities changed, but the films stayed, curled up on my shelf, or lodged in the pit of my chest like something I swallowed by accident.
These five rom-coms didn’t just entertain me. They reprogrammed me. They broke me open and stitched me back together slightly wrong, like a soft Frankenstein made of longing and banter. Many of them were watched alone in half-empty theatres. Some during the collapse of something I wasn’t ready to name yet. And all of them, in their own way, made me feel a little less like an alien pretending to be a person in a party dress. I’ve dedicated so much of my life writing songs about relationships and it’s no wonder my biggest song is Better Than The Movies. These film set the bar high.
Beginners (2010)
I saw this in a theatre alone. In the middle of a terrible too long situationship, I knew nothing about the movie but it turned out to be one of my favourite films of all time. I went back again and again like it was a place I used to live. This was before I moved to LA, but the film felt like LA in a way I had yet to experience. The story folds in on itself, like a love letter that’s been opened too many times. Dogs talk (sort of), people roller skate in hallways, someone drives on a curb, there’s a Halloween party and a lot of art and sadness. I understood all of it.
The F Word (2013)
A real Toronto movie. Like, real Toronto. Not trying to be New York. It’s the TTC, dim damp bars, bleak diners and that specific loneliness I always feel in Toronto. I don’t always love the whole "guy befriends girl and waits her out" plot (it gives me the ick) but this one has actual soul. It's clever and charming and Daniel Radcliffe is wonderfully awkward. And Adam Driver’s line "I just had sex and I’m about to eat nachos!" is, frankly, cinema. It’s funny, quirky and authentic representation of what it was like to be a millennial in Toronto during their 20’s.
Love & Other Drugs (2010)
A deceptively shiny movie. It starts like a sexy pharmaceutical ad and then gently shatters. For someone like me, someone with a real, life threatening illness, it was disarming. Funny and devastating, all wrapped in a clever 90’s package of hard lofts and coffee shops. The vulnerability wasn’t performative. It felt lived-in. It made me laugh loudly and then cry alone in my kitchen twenty minutes later. A perfect film, honestly.
Before Sunrise (1995)
This one isn’t really a rom-com. It’s a walking conversation with yearning built in. Nothing much happens and yet everything happens. It’s for people who think too much, fall in love too fast, and would absolutely miss a train for someone they just met in a bookstore. Less ha-ha funny and more please let me believe this kind of connection still exists funny.
Her (2013)
There are very few movies that broke me in a prophetic way (gentle nod to “White God” and how it influenced my charity work) but this one did. In fact when I saw it at Bloor Cinema with my friend D. I found myself hysterical at the end of the film sitting in the hallway as he tried to calm me down. The digital grief that movie brought me will forever haunt.
This one is like a whisper you accidentally fell in love with. I watched it and thought this is what it feels like to miss someone who hasn’t left yet. It’s not about technology, not really. It’s about loneliness in high resolution. Everyone wears high-waisted pants and speaks gently because they’re afraid their sadness might be contagious.
Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a voice, and somehow it feels less ridiculous than the last situationship I had. Scarlett Johansson isn’t a body, but she’s everything else. And somewhere in the middle of the film, I realized I’d been holding my breath.
This movie makes you feel like you're in love with your own thoughts. And then it reminds you: your thoughts have already left you for someone else. I feel like my life closely mirrors this movie in too many ways and it’s hard to believe it came out in 2013.
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I don’t watch these movies the same way anymore. I flinch at different lines. Sometimes I fast forward to the parts just to say the lines with them. But they’re still here, woven into how I love, how I grieve, how I look at someone across a room and think: it’s you, isn’t it? They make me believe in a bigger imperfect messy picture of love.
It reminds me that who you fall for in love rarely makes sense, but it always leaves a mark.
These films stand as evidence that relationships are strange, specific, and never quite what you planned, but can stay in your bone forever.
I'm not very rom com oriented, as I tend to feel manipulated by film genres, but the best of the genres manage to surprise me in a good way. I'm unfamiliar with most of your picks (and have noted to check them out), but I loved "Her". A few of mine:
- High Fidelity. Yes, the self-absorbed guy is an asshole through most of it but he painfully explores his prior relationships until the lightbulb goes off in his head. And it's based in Chicago. And it features cool music.
- Up in the Air. Ryan (George Clooney) plays a all-together middle aged guy who keeps relationships at a distance until he meets fellow business traveler Alex (Vera Farmiga) who convinces him his life is somewhat empty and has a surprise for him.
- Getting It Right. An obscure British film about a shy 31-year old virgin who gets entangled with three different women and he must make a decision. Charmingly awkward.
- Lars and the Real Girl. A socially awkward bachelor uses a relationship with a blow-up sex doll (with which he has no sex) as training wheels for starting a genuine relationship.
- The Sure Thing. Follows the typical teen rom com trope of the guy pursuing the hot girl until he realizes that it was the contentious, girl-next-door he wanted all along. But the writing is clever and John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga are priceless.
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I'm cheating a little in that this is mostly regarded as a drama but there's endless depths of dark humor here as the film explores the role of memory in shaping our romantic desires (and delusions).
As always, a wistful, thought piece of writing.