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One of my all-time favorites is The Wedding Singer with Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler. Partly the 1980's soundtrack, partly a lot of very funny moments, and just two very likeable characters, and a very likeable supporting cast as well. I kind of fall in love with Drew Barrymore a little every time I watch her in this movie, and it's one I can't resist watching again every time it's on.

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Another I love is Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, with Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow. Mostly just the friendship between the two girls, and the underdog sympathy you have for them, amid the vicious cliques they endured in high school, that they're reluctant to experience again by attending their 10th high school reunion. Both the best and worst scenarios possible occur, which I found really interesting.

Over the years after high school running into classmates, I came to realize I was a lot more popular than I felt back when I was in school. And I think most of us experience that, and that feeling in virtually everyone was vicariously well explored through characters of various cliques in the movie.

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More of a comedy, but with elements of romance, female bonding and ruthless cattiness,
She Gets What She Wants.

A very funny movie about the rivalry between two queen-bee girls, with a delightfully small-town Texas twist.


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Another with Adam Sandler, Spanglish. About a restaurant owner/chef and his wife who hire a Mexican single mother (with a young daughter) who barely speaks English, and gradually learns functional English while in their employ. It also shows a mutual admiration develop between the two, that transcends their being separated by both language and culture. A really nice romantic story, enjoyable in its twists for both what happens, and also what doesn't happen. It engages, and defies expectations.

Until I saw the above two movies, I never really through of Sandler as a romantic guy. But certainly in these two movies, he is.

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Another I enjoyed is Shallow Hal

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Shallow Hal is a 2001 American romantic comedy film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jack Black about a shallow man who, after hypnosis, begins to see people's inner beauty reflected in their outward appearance.


After a chance meeting with motivational speaker Tony Robbins, to help the unsuccessful guy achieve his dreams, Robbins hypnotizes the guy so that he doesn't see people as they really look, but sees beyond their surface appearance to their inner beauty. And falls in love with the girl of his dreams (Gwyneth Paltrow), seeing her kindness and inner beauty, not seeing her true appearance that everyone else sees. His closest friend is played by Jason Alexander.

I saw it a few years ago, but was just flipping channels and saw it on.



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A less successful movie I liked a lot was Milk Money


About an 11-or-so kid who lives with his widower father(Ed Harris), and he and his two 11-year-old classmates have this idea to pool their piggy-bank money, go downtown and hire a hooker (Melanie Griffith) to let them see her naked. The situation evolves into them bringing her to their classroom for show and tell so they can do a fun presentation on biological reproduction for the class. That scene alone is really funny.
Then as things progress the kid grows to like her and think of her as a possible wife for his dad, and a mom for him.
The whole hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold thing.

Not a box office hit or critically acclaimed, but both me and my girlfriend really enjoyed it. So it withstood the date test.



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Another funny movie is The Favor

Where a pretty blonde housewife (Harley Jane Kozak)is mostly content with her husband and children, but suddenly is having erotic dreams about her high school football captain boyfriend she never actually had sex with. And in a mid-life crisis, is wondering what her life would have been like if she'd wound up with him instead.

So she goes to her promiscuous best friend (Elizabeth McGovern) and asks her to go to Colorado where the guy lives now, sleep with him, and tell her what it was like. Even with all the previous men the friend's been with it turns out to be the most gratifying and erotic experience of her friend's life, and despite that she asked her friend to sleep with him, she is insanely jealous of her, and wants to experience it herself. A Women's Logic-type situation.
It ends up being a hilarious love-quintet involving the two women, her husband, her friend's boyfriend (an early role by Brad Pitt) and the high school ex-boyfriend. And somehow in the end, while annoyed, each mostly has a better appreciation of what and who they started with.

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Another that had horrible reviews but I enjoyed is My Life In Ruins

Starring an educated woman who is both lonely and working in an unfulfilling job as a group tour guide in Athens, Greece. She runs a bus-full of annoying people and an irritable Greek tour-bus-driver, and as they all get to know each other, people who had seemed annoying begin to reveal their motivations that made them that way, and become more sympathetic. And what had been perceived as a bad situation turns out to be a very fulfilling one.

The actress in the central role (Nia Vardalos) starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and critics pan this movie as way sub-par to the Greek Wedding movie. But when I finally watched the Greek Wedding movie, I found that movie sub-par and much prefer this one. Some beautiful scenery in this movie too.

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An uplifting movie is Last Holiday

Starring Queen Latifah as a sales employee in a department store, who sees her doctor and is told she has a terminal illness. For 20 years she's had dreams of a trip to Europe and living the vacation of her dreams. And with little time left and nothing to lose, she decides to blow her savings and fulfill her dreams while she can. At the expensive five-star resort, because she spends money so freely she is mistaken for a woman of wealth and influence, and given pretty much free reign by the hotel management and staff, and ends up traveling in high circles with the guests, including a U.S. senator and his lobbyist backers.
Oddly, the freedom of having nothing to lose makes her unafraid to pursue her career interests and love interest, that were both available to her all along. Funny, but also sentimental, and therefore fits in the chick-flick box.

In some ways similar to the movie Joe vs. the Volcano, about a guy similarly working a very unfulfilling job, who has a life-altering event that sends him across the world on a wwild adventure, with Meg Ryan playing multiple roles in the same movie. A bit more quirky and off the wall than Last Holiday, but very pleasant and often hilarious.


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A favorite of mine from 1997 is Still Breathing


Where a street performer (Brendan Fraser) in Arizona from a clairvoyant family, like happens for everyone in his family, has a premonition that he's going to meet the love of his life and marry her. So he travels to Los Angeles where he envisioned meeting her. And she's a beautiful girl, but turns out to be something of a con artist who habitually uses and discards men for financial favors.

And while she initially sees Brendan Fraser's character as an easy mark, because he's such a naive and kind and selfless person, she eventually falls in love with him and then feels guilty and unworthy of him. A quietly wonderful movie about the redemptive power of love.

Definitely not a big-budget Hollywood epic, this movie has a very Sundance Film Festival feel to it.



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Another that kind of surprised me was Dirty Dancing (1987), that despite some trite dialogue is surprrisingly uplifting and fun. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze have great onscreen chemistry.

 Quote:
The film drew adult audiences instead of the expected teens, with viewers rating the film highly.[23] Many filmgoers, after seeing the film once, went back into the theater to watch it a second time.[23] Word-of-mouth promotion took the film to the number one position in the United States, and in 10 days it had broken the $10 million mark. By November, it was also achieving international fame. Within seven months of release, it had brought in $63 million in the US and boosted attendance in dance classes across America.[46] It was one of the highest-grossing films of 1987, earning $170 million worldwide.[47][48]

The film's popularity continued to grow after its initial release. It was the number one video rental of 1988[49] and became the first film to sell a million copies on video. When the film was re-released in 1997, ten years after its original release, Swayze received his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,[12] and videos were still selling at the rate of over 40,000 per month.[12] As of 2005, it was selling a million DVDs per year,[50] with over ten million copies sold as of 2007.[51]

A May 2007 survey by Britain's Sky Movies listed Dirty Dancing as number one on "Women's most-watched films", above the Star Wars trilogy, Grease, The Sound of Music, and Pretty Woman.[52] The film's popularity has also caused it to be called "the Star Wars for girls."[6][53][54] An April 2008 article in Britain's Daily Mail listed Dirty Dancing as number one on a list of "most romantic movie quotes ever", for Baby's line: "I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you."[55]

The film's music has also had considerable impact. The closing song, "(I've Had) The Time of My Life", has been listed as the "third most popular song played at funerals" in the UK.[6]


I love that line about "Star Wars for girls".

That explains how Sands resort selected the "I've Had the Time of My Life" song for prominent use in their commercials for at least 12 years now. The movie soundtrack is still so popular I still hear the songs on the radio while driving pretty much every day, 33 years later.

An interesting detail, while this movie skyrocketed Jennifer Grey to superstardom, it was pretty much the end of her career. She was growing in popularity in movies like Red Dawn and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (my favorite with her). But right after she completed Dirty Dancing she had plastic surgery to straighten her nose, and it completely changed her appearance. So ironically, while Dirty Dancing made her a highly marketable face, she changed that face, and unrecognizable, had trouble finding work after that.


I actually like as much if not more the sequel/prequel Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. Where the first movie was set in a Catskill mountains resort in 1963, the latter prequel is set in Cuba in 1959, on the eve of Castro's revolution there. Where the dancing is a repressed expression of freedom.
Despite that the movie was widely panned, I think it has a better-looking cast, better cinematography and location scenery, and far more palatable dialogue, that cleverly plays on the undercurrent of revolution building. Patrick Swayze has a brief re-appearance as the dance instructor at a resort hotel in Havana.




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