Streaming has made it easier for people to find their favorite movies, watch old ones for the first time, and just enjoy the holidays in their own way, whether they want to watch a romance movie with friends, by themselves, or with their partners. This year, HBO Max has a great selection of movies that will make people think about love, but maybe not in the way they think.
There are films that are good for Valentine’s Day and make you feel bright and warm feelings of romance, but there are also films that mix traditional romantic tropes with action, mystery, and suspense. The results range from interesting to amazing, giving viewers a wide range of romance movies to enjoy. In the end, the following movies show and say different things about love, romance, and sexuality that are interesting to watch.
(500) Days of Summer
In the strange but charming movie, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel play the main roles. (500) Days of Summer by Marc Webb comes after Tom and Summer. Tom works as a writer for a company that makes greeting cards. He wants to be an architect. During his time there, he meets Summer, who had just been hired. As one does, the two get close through music and later have a very important talk about love. Tom is as close as you can get to a hopeless romantic, but Summer doesn’t seem to believe in love. Still, they end up having a casual relationship with many ups and downs.
500 Days of Summer is likely the most mysterious of the bunch. The story of the movie isn’t told in a straight line, and it focuses on casual relationships and talks about love that are common in modern times. The story of the movie isn’t just an oddity; it shows how both main characters see love and makes important points about love in the information age.
Crazy, Rich Asians
Rachel and Nick are at the center of the glitzy romance starring Constance Wu and Henry Golding. Everyone knows how scary it can be to meet the parents of someone you might love for the rest of your life. People learned about the different tropes that come with meeting the parents from the movies, books, and songs that were popular everywhere. The disgruntled parent who supposedly wants the best for the main character, the open-minded family member who supports the main character, and the large amount of comic relief are all mainstays in romance media and in real life. Art copies life, as the saying goes. These movies are based on the real-life events that we keep hidden in the back of our minds.
Crazy, Rich Asians is able to try out these tropes in a way that makes the movie more interesting to watch while still being relatable at its core. Rachel getting married into a billion-dollar Singaporean business empire might not be something that everyone could relate to. But the decision works well for two things. Meeting the parents can feel like meeting a billionaire or the head of state for many reasons, both inside and outside the family. A relationship could be made or broken by how people first see each other. Even if the relationship between the two people gets better, there isn’t much chance that the parents-in-law will ever show the same respect.
The pressure is made worse by the fact that the movie looks at how people of color interact with each other. The story is built around conversations about immigration, becoming more like the West, and feeling like a fraud. The movie isn’t preachy, but it doesn’t ignore the problems either. Complex conversations only make the movie better and make the ending much more interesting.
The chosen movies have many important themes, funny scenes, and scenes that will make you cry that would make anyone’s date night memorable. HBO Max has a lot to offer, from our favorite rom-coms to examples of great indie films. Many of them could be found here, but there are also a ton of movies about Valentine’s Day for people who want something extra to watch.
Happy Together
In 1997, Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, and Chang Chen starred in a movie about a gay couple from Hong Kong who go to Argentina. Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai’s relationship is very rocky, and that’s putting it mildly. The two keep getting into fights and making up. After every fight, the two of them seem to get back together because they like each other and don’t want to be alone. Argentina turns out to be a new frontier for them, where they face outside threats, make new friends, and finally find a source of conflict between them.
The exciting stories of the three main characters are intertwined with the beautiful cinematography. The three stories come together as one before splitting into three endings that tug at the audience’s heartstrings. Happy Together has since been praised as a shining pearl of New Queer Cinema. There are a lot of interesting movies in this broad genre, but Happy Together by the great Wong Kar-Wai is still one of the most interesting romances you can watch online.
Love & Basketball
Gina Prince-Bythewood’s first feature film as a director is a great look at both sports and love. Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps play Monica and Quincy, who have known each other since they were kids and love basketball. The film acts as an envelope in four parts. Both characters’ stories are slowly getting better and more interesting. This expert choice gives a pretty accurate picture of love. The movie shows how both romantic and platonic relationships can be affected by internal biases and structural discrimination.
The movie does a great job of weaving in a second storyline about how men treat women in sports. Quincy’s sports goals are taken much more seriously than Monica’s because he is a man. Even though Monica and Quincy’s relationship is interesting and heartwarming throughout the movie, it starts to fall apart when misogyny keeps popping up.
The roles that Lathan and Epps play are so interesting that audiences are drawn in and root for the couple throughout the whole movie. The movie is now a classic in the romance genre, and for many African Americans, it was one of the few movies that showed them in a positive light.
Pariah
The great coming-of-age movie by Pariah Des Rees In Pariah, Adeporo Oduyo plays 17-year-old Alike, whose nickname is “Lee.” The story of Alike starts with a group. From going to clubs with her best friend Laura, who is also a lesbian, to having a supportive father in Arthur, Alike’s transformation into a more mature version of herself is a beautiful picture of lesbian identity during adolescence.
As the audience watches Alike realize that she is a lesbian and decide to be herself, they also see how violently homophobic her mother is. Choice is one of the movie’s strong points that are brought out. Parents who don’t like their children’s sexuality tell a lot of queer people, especially queer people of color, that they are gay because of brainwashing or peer pressure, not because of how they really feel.
The way Alike is portrayed is important for people to understand. A person who can be both sure of themselves and interested in the world around them. Alike goes back and forth between knowing who she is and who she wants to be with and dealing with the problems of living in a homophobic home. The fact that Pariah is able to have so many important conversations through their characters shows how broad the romance genre can be.
She’s All That
This popular teen romance from the 1990s stars Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook. The movie is a mix of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and George Cukor’s My Fair Lady. It’s about a popular guy named Zack Siler who falls for an awkward art student named Laney Boggs. Zack and his best friend Dean (Paul Walker) make a crazy bet that he could replace his cheating ex-girlfriend Taylor with any other girl at school.
Zack is interested in Laney, a nice but not very popular student. Because of how hard he works, Zack soon finds out more about Laney, and vice versa. Ego, on the other hand, is a threat that could destroy a relationship that is based on real feelings.
It would be an understatement to say that this movie has a lot of big names in it. In She’s All That, their two most famous leads, along with the late Paul Walker, Lil’ Kim, Kieran Culkin, Usher, and Matthew Lillard, all play important roles. She’s All That is a fun romance that perfectly captures the spirit of the ’90s. It has everything a person looking for in a romance would want.
The Birdcage
This version of the French classic La Cage Aux Folles is a lot of fun, and it stars Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. Armand and Albert Goldman, whose names are in the title of the show, are played by the two men. Albert plays “Starina,” the club’s best-known role. Armand isn’t sure what to do when their son Val tells them that he has a new girlfriend named Barbara. When they find out that Barbara’s parents are the very conservative Senator Kevin Keeley and his wife Louise Keeley, this resistance turns into fear-based disapproval.
Armand and Albert are supposed to run back into the closet and pretend to be straight while Barbara’s family joins them for what was supposed to be a nice dinner. This is to impress Barbara’s family and avoid conflict. The result is funny and complicated, but most of all it is funny and heartfelt. The Birdcage, like the book it’s based on, shows the beauty of queer love while standing up to bigotry. It shows the current generation how queer couples survived and thrived in the face of both interpersonal and structural oppression.
The Notebook
Millions of people can watch the famous movie with Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams right now on HBO Max. The movie is told by an old man named “Duke,” played by James Garner. It focuses on the relationship between Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling) and Allison Hamilton. The story takes place in South Carolina in the 1940s, and the title notebook is a record of Noah and Allie’s growing love.
Noah is a poor lumber worker who quickly falls in love with the beautiful heiress, Allie, just like Jack did in the popular romance film Titanic. Their summer love story has enough scenes to warm the hearts of the audience. But they are also drawn into the fight between Allie’s parents, who don’t like Noah, and Noah. Their relationship is almost destroyed by classism and the fact that a war is coming up.
Even though The Notebook has a lot of clichés that have become overused, the movie is now seen as an important part of the American romance canon. The Notebook is a great movie for anyone who wants to see great acting and a beautiful love story.
The Vow
Rachel McAdams is in The Vow again. She and Channing Tatum play the main roles. After a terrible car accident, Paide (McAdams) and Leo (Tatum) are forced to deal with the real world. Paige and Leo’s journey of love is rocky because they have to deal with parents who don’t like them and forgetting who they are. When old partners show up, they threaten to tear the pair apart with their new ideas.
As dramatic as the plot seems, The Vow has plots and events that give the characters depth and make them seem real, which makes the audience like them more. People get to see Paige rediscover her passions and traumas, which helps her remember why she made the choices she did before she and Leo got married. Leo is struggling after the car accident, which is normal, but the way he acts puts his relationship with Paige at risk.
Envy, confidence, and remembering are three important parts of the movie that add to the already interesting love story. When put together, they make a movie that tugs at your heart in one of the most satisfying ways possible.
