Valentine's - An Elephant Love Medley to Moulin Rouge!

We've been celebrating Valentine's with lovers from Eternal Sunshine, Gone Girl, and Weekend. Here's Jorge Molina on a film that's practically our mascot at TFE.

There are many angles I could take on Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! for Valentine’s Day. Its unapologetic pastiche of classic tragedy and romance. Its embrace of melodrama and sentimentality. Its larger-than-life lens on life and characters. The way Nicole Kidman fake orgasms.

I decided I could take on all of them in 300 words the same way the movie did in 3 minutes and 50 seconds.

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Valentine's - Gone Girl

Team Experience is celebrating Valentines Day with favorite love scenes. Here's Chris...

Let’s not allow the roses of Valentine’s Day to let some thorny romances go unnoticed. For all its shocks and grisly goings-on, Gone Girl is still something of a morbid romance - if you can get past the extremity (ya know, like murder) to see its proposition that successful relationships require big compromise. And also that a relationship can’t expect to keep up its picturesque beginnings.

Take Amy and Nick’s rose-colored glasses moment: in a literal haze of sweetness, the two exchange a kiss, Nick grazing her lips in a distinctive cool move. It’s a sexy and definitive moment, one that defines what their love will forever chase when things get much more difficult.

The memory of the confectionary kiss is almost too good to be true, certainly at least too “perfect” to maintain. When Amy sees Nick recreate this with his mistress, it isn’t just a betrayal of fidelity but of the veneer they had created together, a moment she thought was theirs alone. She recounts this (a version, at least) to Lola Kirk’s shifty confidant with such reverence as to reveal more of Amy’s storytelling abilities, but a true genuine love for Nick as well. Amy’s sociopathy means she plays with a different language in expressing her affection, one that requires mining through terrible deeds to understand but is there all the same. Interpret Nick’s decision to stay together as you must, but their twisted game isn’t without actual love.

What's your favorite twisted love story?

Valentine's - Weekend

Team Experience is celebrating Valentines Day with favorite love scenes. Here's Jose...

Early on in my life I decided that all my favorite romances had to end with the lovers apart. And I mean, seriously, can you name a perfect romance that ends with happily ever after? From Casablanca to Dr. Zhivago and Roman Holiday, it's as if the movies have always told us that a brief, but powerful romance, the kind which makes us swoon in our 80s like Gloria Stuart in Titanic, is the kind of romance we all should crave. But it wasn't until I watched Andrew Haigh's Nottingham-set Weekend in 2011 that I realized as a gay man there was finally one of these romances for someone like me (I won't go into details of how this movie seems to me my biopic...) in which no one ended dead, as most gay romances do in fiction.

In the last scene we see Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New) together, they share a brief kiss as they say goodbye before Glen heads to America. Even though there is nothing really "tragic" about their farewell, it's this idea of the person existing in the same planet, as you have to find the will to move on, that's most devastating. I can see the lovers running into each other years in the future (I doubt they remained Facebook friends, I wouldn't have, would you?) and either of them going into full "of all the gin joints..." Bogie mode as they wonder "what if".

What are some of your favorite non-tragic gay romances? What romantic movie do you feel could be your biopic? 

Valentine's - Beyond the Lights

The Film Experience is celebrating Valentine's Day! Here's Daniel...

Rarely does a film show the restorative power of love like Gina Prince-Bythewood’s alive and swoony Beyond the Lights. While the film has much more on its mind than hooking up – from reconciling depression to machinating local politics – its undeniable electricity sparks from the mindmeld that allows each of its two leads to be seen for the first time and fly in whichever direction they choose.

Prefabricated pop star Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, flawless) literally lives in chains, bound between the blinding glare of paparazzi flashbulbs and a suffocating armada of handlers that exploit her image in the name of the game. Kaz (Sundance darling Nate Parker) is a cop on her detail living under the blue-and-red burden of prefixed expectations. He grabs her hand after she jumps off a hotel balcony. There’s no meet cute here; it’s a spiritual lifting.

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Valentine's - Shakespeare in Love

The Film Experience is celebrating Valentine's Day! Here's Dancin' Dan on an Oscar-winning romance.

Have you ever fallen in love at first sight? Not its more common sister, lust at first sight, but real, true, struck-by-cupid's-arrow L-O-V-E at first sight?

It is a rush. A breathless rush when everything around you seems to slow down and disappear until the only thing you can see, or even care about, is this other person. It will cloud your judgment, and perhaps impair your ability to speak, but all your senses become laser-focused on the object of your affections, this perfect being for whom you have fallen head over heels. More...

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