Megan Stielstra's Blog

For the record, I watch mostly big-budget action movies with lots of special effects and formulaic writing. After that are the requisite arty foreign films/documentaries and then the Sundance Indie stuff. I do not—NOT—watch romantic comedies. Hate ‘em. It used to be for the stereotypical cynical New Millenium Woman reasons (doesn’t happen like that, blah blah, shut up Meg Ryan, etc), but that changed a bit after I fell in love. After Christopher and I staretd dating, I saw that really horrible Drew Barrymore movie—the one set in Hawaii, where she has short-term memory loss and has to date Adam Sandler over and over again—and I thought, “Oh! I now understand what Drew Barrymore and Meg Ryan are feeling! I get it! But this is still a really bad movie!” That was the moment I realized that it hadn’t been my single-ness that made me hate the genre. It was just the movies themselves.

Over the years, there’s been a few exceptions to this rule (and I'm open for suggestions!):

When Harry Met Sally (this is where we can forgive Meg Ryan for all those Tom Hanks movies) is awesome because of, of course, the orgasm scene, but also the dialogue is great. Thank-you Carrie Fischer who did a doctor job on the script. I like me some Carrie Fischer. I mean, d’uh! Princess Leia! But she’s also a bang of a writer, I think. Her second novel, Surrender the Pink, has such one-liner gems as, when the guy tells Dinah he just wants to be friends, she says, “as opposed to what? An end table?” or, upon Dinah sleeping with her ex, her best friend tells her, “You had to! As soon as he told you he had a new girlfriend you went into shock, and the only way he could revive you was to slap you in the vagina with his penis!”

(hee hee)

If Lucy Fell—a little Indie flick with Sarah Jessica Parker and Ben Stiller before they became SARAH JESSICA PARKER and BEN STILLER—for the following reasons:

1. it made me want a fencing sword
2. the Lucy character wears cardigan sweaters around her neck instead of scarves, which is my new look for winter ‘05.
3. there’s a very hilarious conversation about poop (which, typically, I'm not a fan of [re: anything directed by those Something About Mary Guys] but this one is very subtle and it kills me every time)
4. Scarlett Johnasson, age eleven
5. Ben Stiller saying, “I … art?”
6. Because I, also, am a voyeur

Then there’s a couple that I love, love, love but I’m not sure if they fit into the whole “romantic comedy” genre. I mean, there’s some romance, and some comedy, but it’s pretty dark comedy. Or else, just darkness. Specifically, I’m thinking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (my number three favorite movie of all time) and The Princess and the Warrior (my number one favorite movie of all time, this really beautiful, creepy German flick by the Run Lola Run people with a kick-ass tracheotomy scene that happens under a mack truck, and then there’s that part at the end, when they’re in the car, which I’m not going to tell you about but, seriously, rush out and rent it right now).

(for those of you on the edge of your seat, my number two favorite movie of all time is Raiders of the Lost Ark)

And then, then, then—there’s Amelie.

I’ve always been a fan of Jeunet, the director—City of Lost Children, Delicatessen and Alien IV are up there on my list—and couldn't wait to see his new one. My friend Jeff and I got tickets for a Sunday night showing at the Musicbox for the International Film Festival (this was before it was wide-released). All that day, I waited tables (I work weekends at a brunch place in Wicker Park) and it was crazy busy. We were running our asses off—eggs, pancakes, coffee, coffee, decaf or regular? no time to stop for even a minute!—so we didn’t find out until the end of the shift that the United States had begun bombing Iraq. That morning. While I’d been carrying plates of eggs and pancakes, the war had started.

I called up Jeff and told him I didn’t want to go to a movie. I felt like I should be, I don’t know, doing something! Protesting, or screaming, or writing letters or … what? It was a similar feeling to just-after September 11th or Katrina: here is my money, here is my blood, now what else? What else can I do? My friend Joe says that, in moments such as this, people just want to be together. Community, I don’t know—anyhow, we went. The Musicbox is a huge, historic theater over on Southport, all decked out, big thick curtains and old movie posters and ornate design. It’s sort of magical in there, I think, all old-school glory, but that day it was thick with this horrible sadness. You could touch it, cut it, wring it dry like a washcloth. And you know how there’s a live organ player going before the film starts? Even that sounded depressing. I remember thinking, what the hell am I doing here? Answer: Where the hell else was I going to go? That feeling was everywhere!

And then the film started and everything, immediately, changed. To date, seeing Amelie for the first time remains the most significant cinematic experience of my life. The lights came up and people were smiling, and there was all this, I don’t know, hope. Like the part where she’s walking down the street, arm in arm with the blind man and describing all the things she sees so that he can see them, too. This is what I can do, I thought. Little things: I can try. I can try to make other people’s lives better, like my students, my friends, my neighbors, strangers, whatever. And I don’t know if that’s romance, and I don’t know if it’s comedy, but that’s where they’ve got it shelved in the rental place. I went there yesterday to get it. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I need to watch again.