Sean Weitner | The reason for the season

Since it is Valentine's Day: Did any movies last year affect your perception of love, or at least resonate with you on the subject? Preferably in a positive way, and preferably in a romantic sense; otherwise I'll start talking about filial love and A.I., and nobody wants that.

It occurs to me now that in my year-end best-of recap, I neglected to include Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, which came out early enough in the year for me to forget it was a 2001 film. (I also forgot The Others, for what it's worth; both float between my second and third tiers.) In the Mood for Love was a high romance in which the couple that's infatuated with each other never gets together. And that's romance, my friends; unrequited, unconsummated longing. If you can lay into that particular violin string with enough mastery, then the emotional affect is so complete that the audience will never think to ask for a happier ending. This is far from a revelation; the idea's older than Shakespeare, and one of my least favorite modern examples, The English Patient, was a Best Picture winner. But In the Mood for Love does this marvelously, using a perfect mix of set design, cinematography, musical motifs … it really is fabulous.

Much less widely seen than that is Suzhou River, about which I've already written. I won't repeat myself, but I will quote myself: "(Suzhou River is not) a portrait of perfect love; think instead of bright splashes of obsession against the massive negative space of the human capacity to make bad decisions. Like an abstract painting, you're more likely to uncover its deepest truths thinking about it than looking at it … even though you can't take your eyes off it." It's something of a Vertigo redux set in Shanghai, and it hit me with much of that film's sad, crushing weight.

And though neither film had happy endings, their ability to communicate the grandeur of romantic love was quite stirring.

Rasheed Newson | All about Amélie

If we're going to talk about movies and love, then I'm going to gush about Amélie. Quirky, adorable and tender, Amélie was a film that inspires romantic cowards — like myself. As the end credits rolled, you left Amélie thinking that love would come to even those who pussyfoot around in games of the heart. It was purely reassuring. And visually, Amélie was a technicolored dream. Of course, the whole fairytale could only unfold at the movies, but that's a major part of why we go to the movies. To gawk and to dream and to think, however foolishly: That could happen to me.

Andy Ross | All kinds

Think about the number of movies this year, where it wasn't purely romantic love:

A.I. = Questionable love
Amélie = Hesitant love
American Pie 2 = Struggling love
American Sweathearts = Improper love
The Anniversary Party = Failing love
Bridget Jones's Diary = Fickle love
Captain Corelli's Mandolin = Unpatriotic love
Crazy Beautiful = Dangerous love
Ghost World = Awkward love
Hannibal = Disturbing love
I Am Sam = Overcoming-all love
In the Mood for Love = Unallowed love
Iris = Eternal love
Kate and Leopold = Difficult love
L.I.E. = Taboo love
Life as a House = Familial love
The Man Who Wasn't There = Vengeful love
The Mexican = Bickering love
Monsters, Inc. = Paternal love
Moulin Rouge = Parted love
Mulholland Drive = Obsessive love
Novocaine = Conned love
Ocean's Eleven = Regained love
The Others = Maternal love
Pearl Harbor = Wartime love
Planet of the Apes = Cross-species love
The Princess and the Warrior = Icky love
The Royal Tenenbaums = Incestuous love
Series 7 = Making-a-gay-man-straight love
Shrek = Ogre love
Vanilla Sky = Even more obsessive love
The Wedding Planner = Trite love

That's a lot of love.

Sean Weitner | Non-trivial

At some trivial level, every story's about love, and every story is tacitly instructive in terms of having a lesson to impart, so let me fine-tune the question some, though I'm not sure how. Have you seen a movie that's made you love more or less? For instance, I got some romantic buzz from Mouin Rouge, and the melodramatic ending made my wife terribly sad, so there was some emotion in the afterglow, but it didn't prompt an intellectual response in me. But The Man Who Wasn't There made me think about love; to really understand the story, you have to go into yourself to try to comprehend the nature of the relationship between the barber and his wife, and between the barber and Birdy. Even Hannibal was interesting in this sense; the magnitude of love Hannibal feels for Clarice in their platonic relationship dwarves the magnitude of love that can be observed in movies who are supposedly all about romance and love, like Serendipity.

Andy Ross | Paternal love

Both Monsters, Inc. and I Am Sam made me think hard about paternal love and its fit into romantic love. This loves that drives protection and adoration is so basic and simple. Penn's character, though unable to understand most things, understood it completely in I Am Sam. Sulley is driven by it in Monsters, Inc. to such a great extreme that he's willing to give up a life-long friendship for it. A lot of people talk intellectually about the basis for romantic love as part of the evolutionary drive towards mating, the eros first theory. But, I've found in my relationship that paternal love, a wish to protect each other and make each other happy, holds equal weight. It's not a question of control over the other person, but devotion.

Sean Weitner | Too vanilla

Andy, on the same topic, I'd mention Gosford Park, in which the maternal love is shown to be equally strong but, of course, more sublimated (upstairs … downstairs). And, of course, A.I., which touches on the horrifying hyper-clarity of unconditional love. As with In the Mood for Love, 'tis better to have loved and lost … .

I also found Vanilla Sky very provocative about love, and the movie was so disappointing because, in the end, it copped out on this point. The whole sci-fi framing device really exists for one purpose: so Tom Cruise can be a deranged murderer but not really be a deranged murderer; so he can instead be a mind-tripped-upon victim who, you know, learns from his homicidal mistakes and can be better adjusted for it. But when Cruise's inextinguishable guilt causes his mind to snap and resurrect the woman whom he had treated so shabbily — that was powerful stuff. But the sci-fi layer detracted from it so greatly; I can see the appeal to Cameron Crowe of being able to reinvent/reimagine your life through pop culture, but the narrative value of those machinations were nil — it didn't use pop culture to comment on love, or love to comment on pop culture. You could argue that the relationship he dreams up between himself and Cruz is a manifestation of a pop-culture-riddled upbringing (and is there for mature or immature or deeper than it first appears or any other thing), but the post-dream relationship seems like a very natural extension of the glimpse we got of their pre-dream relationship, so that doesn't hold either. You could then argue that the dream didn't begin after the night clubbing but at the very beginning of the film — the movie opens with Penelope Cruz uttering the "open your eyes" mantra — but that possibility is dropped so quickly that hot potatoes would be jealous. I think Crowe wanted to indict those who live like David Aames, but really, he exonerates them.