V-Day
just read this on MSN - pretty funny...
Love is a drug... here are the antidotes: Movies that will make you happy to be unattached
By Jim Emerson
Special to MSN Movies
"Hell is other people." -- Jean-Paul Sartre
For some people, Valentine's Day is a drag because it reminds them that they don't have a Significant Other to share lemminglike compulsory romance rituals. For others, it's a bummer because it's an unavoidable calendar appointment (like tax day) that not only insists on what you're supposed to do by the deadline but also how you're supposed to feel.
Even more than most institutionalized holidays, the modern phenomenon of Valentine's Day celebrates the power of marketing to coerce you into expressing cheap sentiments in trite ways, with an annual red-tag sale on Hallmark-branded sap. This festival of emotional date-rape is like a gigantic besotted frat party where people feel compelled to go through the motions of "expressing" pre-programmed feelings they don't feel to get some tail, or at least to avoid getting into a nasty domestic spat. (On Feb. 14, they should change the familiar barroom poster to: "Wine -- Helping Desperate People Have Sex Since the Old Testament!" and post it in the lavatories of overpriced "romantic" restaurants just as a healthy reminder. Wine's good for the heart.)
Movies -- along with mawkish pop songs and the supermarket greeting-card aisle (over there, next to the mayo) -- are the source of so many of our pathetic romantic ideals and illusions about love, sex and marriage. And yet, there are films that slice through the claptrap with a more penetrating and clear-sighted (not to say cynical) view of what love means. Things like claustrophobia and emptiness and bitterness and stalkers and backstabbers and getting hunks of your heart, mind and flesh ripped up.
So, cuddle up with one of these pictures on Valentine's Day -- or any day -- and revel in the comforting certainty that, existentially speaking, we all live, and die, alone. Ah, quiet at last -- what a relief it is!
Love is a drug... here are the antidotes: Movies that will make you happy to be unattached
By Jim Emerson
Special to MSN Movies
"Hell is other people." -- Jean-Paul Sartre
For some people, Valentine's Day is a drag because it reminds them that they don't have a Significant Other to share lemminglike compulsory romance rituals. For others, it's a bummer because it's an unavoidable calendar appointment (like tax day) that not only insists on what you're supposed to do by the deadline but also how you're supposed to feel.
Even more than most institutionalized holidays, the modern phenomenon of Valentine's Day celebrates the power of marketing to coerce you into expressing cheap sentiments in trite ways, with an annual red-tag sale on Hallmark-branded sap. This festival of emotional date-rape is like a gigantic besotted frat party where people feel compelled to go through the motions of "expressing" pre-programmed feelings they don't feel to get some tail, or at least to avoid getting into a nasty domestic spat. (On Feb. 14, they should change the familiar barroom poster to: "Wine -- Helping Desperate People Have Sex Since the Old Testament!" and post it in the lavatories of overpriced "romantic" restaurants just as a healthy reminder. Wine's good for the heart.)
Movies -- along with mawkish pop songs and the supermarket greeting-card aisle (over there, next to the mayo) -- are the source of so many of our pathetic romantic ideals and illusions about love, sex and marriage. And yet, there are films that slice through the claptrap with a more penetrating and clear-sighted (not to say cynical) view of what love means. Things like claustrophobia and emptiness and bitterness and stalkers and backstabbers and getting hunks of your heart, mind and flesh ripped up.
So, cuddle up with one of these pictures on Valentine's Day -- or any day -- and revel in the comforting certainty that, existentially speaking, we all live, and die, alone. Ah, quiet at last -- what a relief it is!