Ebert - Eberts essentials. 25 movies to mend a broken heart

Other Books by Roger Ebert

An Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life

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Roger Eberts Little Movie Glossary

Roger Eberts Movie Home Companion (annually 19861993)

Roger Eberts Video Companion (annually 19941998)

Roger Eberts Movie Yearbook (annually 19992007, 20092012)

Questions for the Movie Answer Man

Roger Eberts Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino,the Finest Writing from a Century of Film

Eberts Bigger Little Movie Glossary

I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

The Great Movies

The Great Movies II

Your Movie Sucks

Roger Eberts Four-Star Reviews 19672007

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Life Itself: A Memoir

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The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese,Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas

DVD Commentary Tracks

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Citizen Kane

Dark City

Casablanca

Crumb

Floating Weeds

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33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity

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25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart copyright 2012 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
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To begin with full disclosure, I am not at all sure a movie can mend a broken heart. It may be able to distract you, or cheer you up a little, or put a positive spin on things, and if it does any of those things, you can count yourself fortunate. But mending a broken heart? Only time can do thatsometimes.

That said, here are twenty-five films that made me feel very good while I was watching them. Certainly one of the most beneficial was Norman Jewisons Moonstruck, a reminder that Cher at one time was a superb actress, although she has chosen different directions.

It is a film about love. Not content with one romance, it involves five or six, depending on how you count, and conceding that some characters are involved in more than one. It exists in a Brooklyn that has never existeda Brooklyn where the full moon makes the night like day and drives people crazy with amore, when the moon-a hits their eyes like a big-a pizza pie.

And it permits its characters such joyous exuberance. I have long been an admirer of Nicolas Cage. He is dismissed by many movie fans as an overactor, an undisciplined show-off who bolts over the top with the slightest excuse. But certain films require that almost manic quality, and not many actors have the nerve to go for it. Maybe theyre worried about looking goofy.

When Cage as Ronny Cammareri sweeps Loretta Castorini (Cher) off her feet in Moonstruck, he almost, in his exuberance, throws her over his shoulder.

Where are you taking me? she cries.

To the bed! he says.

Not to bed, but to the bed! There is the slightest touch of formality in that phrasing, and it is enough to cause Loretta to let her head fall back in surrender. Such sublime abandon, by Cage and Cher, is part of the magic of Norman Jewisons romantic comedy, but it also depends on truth spoken in plain words.

The movie observes many long-embedded conventions of the romantic comedy. In this case, they all have a reason for being usedeven in the triumphant scene around the kitchen table where everything that must happen, does happen. One of the gifts of a film is to use clichs and deserve them.

There is also great consolation to be found in Richard Linklaters films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. The first presents an accidental encounter that leads to a long night of conversation and revelation. In its own way, it is self-contained. But Jesse and Celine, the characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, create such an absorbing relationship during their long night in Vienna that when they meet again nine years later in Paris, we are grateful that the conversation can continue.

The second film isnt a sequel in any conventional sense. The first film was complete. But something happened between them, and now in Paris they begin to talk again, in a rush. Its not so simple now. Before, they were young, with their lives ahead. Now theyre over thirty, and have made commitments, and this strange relationship stands outside of their lives, almost as an alternate time line. Would that heal your heart? To find that another path in life might find you happiness? Probably not. But isnt it nice to think so?

R OGER E BERT

	A great film
G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17 : Ratings of the Motion Picture Association of America
G	Indicates that the movie is suitable for general audiences
PG	Suitable for general audiences but parental guidance is suggested
PG-13	Recommended for viewers 13 years or above; may contain material inappropriate for younger children
R	Recommended for viewers 17 or older
NC-17	Intended for adults only
141 m.	Running time
2011	Year of theatrical release

About Last Night...

R , 116 m., 1986

Rob Lowe (Danny), Demi Moore (Debbie), James Belushi (Bernie), Elizabeth Perkins (Joan), George DiCenzo (Mr. Favio), Michael Alldredge (Mother Malone), Robin Thomas (Steve), Joe Greco (Gus). Directed by Edward Zwick and produced by Jason Brett and Stuart Oken. Screenplay by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue, based on the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet.

If one of the pleasures of moviegoing is seeing strange new things on the screen, another pleasure, and probably a deeper one, is experiencing moments of recognition-times when we can say, yes, thats exactly right, thats exactly the way it would have happened. About Last Night... is a movie filled with moments like that. It has an eye and an ear for the way we live now, and it has a heart, too, and a sense of humor.

It is a love story. A young man and a young woman meet, and fall in love, and over the course of a year they try to work out what that means to them. It sounds like a simple story, and yet