Crying that makes me cry

I wrote a couple days ago about how Michelle Pfeiffer's performance at the end of The Story of Us kills me. I didn't mention that it is also funny. 

Spoilers for Story of Us, I guess, plus necessarily some further spoilers about other movies, but mostly things you probably already know. 

In a tear-strewn, rambling monologue that lasts the better part of two minutes, Pfeiffer's Katie has a sudden realization of what it would mean to give up her husband Ben (Bruce Willis), in the parking lot of the camp where they have just picked up their kids. At first you can't tell if he is unmoved by her display, but if he doesn't appear to be, it's only because Ben had already been through the emotional ringer himself, and at this point is trying to stick to his own dispassionate resolve.

And what a display. We don't get a lot of scenes in movies where a character is crying as fast as she is talking, which is what Pfeiffer does as she goes through a stream-of-consciousness listing of things she loves about Ben, then undercutting them with inadvertent jabs, then explaining that she didn't mean the jabs, then questioning the semantic logic of something she's just said, before returning to the original stream of praise and love that is highlighted by specific examples and anecdotes from their personal history. That Pfeiffer could do this scene in essentially an unbroken take -- there are a few cutaways to Ben just to see what impact it is having on him, though I'm willing to bet her audio was uninterrupted -- then not only is she a great dramatic actress, able to produce tears and memorize lines that she regurgitates basically without taking a breath, but she is also an incredibly nimble comic one, which this movie has also already shown us in spades.

Whew. I think maybe I need to take my own breath.

The point is, even as this scene is funny, I'm crying throughout it like a total jerk, because it is so sweet and so vulnerable and the examples of the things she gives that she would miss if they were divorced are just so fricking on point. (I always think, when trying to be a better dad, how she praises Ben for always doing the voice of a storybook character in a book he reads their kids, even when he's bone tired.) In fact, there's one particular moment after she's been spinning out in reversals and other general babbling, where she starts forward again like she's shifted into a new gear of her crying, and that really gets me the most. 

So that alone made me want to write a post called "Crying that makes me cry."

It may be an obvious observation that a really good actor can set off a good contagious crying jag if we have become invested in the character they've created. However, I'm not even sure that the majority of times we cry in movies is because an actor is crying. In fact, sometimes this makes us cringe. 

In fact, it's rare enough that I am going to try to list my very best memories of this in my own viewing career, which as I'm writing this, I do not expect to exceed ten. (And yes, I've cried more than ten times at the movies.)

With Pfeiffer's feat taking #1 for the purposes of this list -- which I am not ranking from best to worst, but just in the order I think of them -- let's look at the others that came to mind:

2) Toni Colette in The Sixth Sense. I know I've talked about this before, but Colette's reaction to her son telling her that her mother was always watching her performances from the back of the theater? Which is mixed with the realization that her son must be telling the truth and is actually seeing ghosts? Simply lacerating. Perhaps one of my best ugly cries ever, though it's interesting, it did not happen for me the first time I saw the movie, only subsequent times. (What is it with Bruce Willis in movies that make me cry? Who would have thought?)

3) Liam Neeson in Schindler's List. I have a little "comedy" bit I do where I joke about not having done something -- usually something minor, because to joke about something major would not work -- and I use the dialogue of Oskar Schindler: "But I didn't." This, as you will remember, is Schindler's self-recrimination for not doing more, even more than the many things he had already done, to save as many Jews from the concentration camps as he could. And though I'm sort of mocking the performance with this joke, there's no doubt that him breaking down into tears absolutely tore me asunder when I first saw it. 

4) Tovah Feldshuh in Kissing Jessica Stein. Unlike the last two, this is a moment most of you will not know about at all. I'll set the stage. Feldshuh plays the title character's mother, who is having a heart-to-heart with her daughter about why her daughter is currently miserable. The text of her mother's perspective is that Jessica always expects too much from other people, though this is said in a gentle, loving way. Near the end, she finally reveals the subtext, which is that she knows Jessica has been seeing a woman, even though Jessica hasn't copped to it. Feldshuh says "I think--" and then her voice catches in her throat, just for a second, as she chokes back a tear we didn't even see there. "I think she seems like a very nice girl." Jennifer Westfeldt's Jessica has been crying throughout this scene, but that little hitch gets me more than anything Westfeldt is doing, because it's also the reveal that she loves and supports Jessica, even if she might be a lesbian, and Jessica should never have thought otherwise. The accepting of gay kids by their parents always gets me.

5) Isabella Kai and Violet McGraw in Our Friend. There is something about how Casey Affleck says "Your mom is going to die" -- straightforward but with almost a mechanical loss of his ability to get the words out normally -- to his kids in this movie that starts me on the path. But I think the real waterworks begin when I see how these two kids, who should not be able to do this convincingly at such a young age, react to the news that their mother's cancer is terminal. (This isn't the exact photo, since the only version of the exact scene I could find had watermarks on it.) But in that moment, I feel what it is to realize the enormity and finality of death among children who are too young to properly process it, especially when it is the woman who has cared for you all your lives, but soon will no longer be able to do that, or even be around.  

6) Brendan Fraser in The Whale. I know I'm supposed to feel some sort of shame that this was my #1 movie of 2022 and by now I'm supposed to realize the ways I was wrong to love it, but I'm sorry, I haven't gotten there yet. I broke down a couple times during this movie, and though it was actually a moment that didn't involve crying from Samantha Morton that hit me hardest, I can't deny that Fraser's deep emotional breakdowns in this film got me going again. The sort of big, defiant crying-arguing that he does here is actually so desperate, in the way that it utterly scrapes him out from the inside, that it just wrecked me. I'll leave the discussions of the movie's alleged fatphobia to others.

7) Ricky Schroeder in The Champ. This is a movie I really need to rewatch because it would be more than 40 years since I saw it, and possibly closer to 45. I remember this movie being watched at the house I grew up in, so long ago that the TV was in what was my dad's office for at least the last 20 years he lived there. I think my mom put it on. And when (spoiler alert) the boxer dies at the end of the movie, his son's tears are so real that it confronted me with a sensation I'd never had in a movie before, not to mention the idea of how I would feel if one of my parents died. Did I actually cry? Do I remember it because my mother was crying and I thought that was weird? Not sure, but it had a powerful enough impact that I remember Schroeder's acting all these years later. 

8) Kaitlyn Dias in Inside Out. You don't even have to be able to see the actor's face for realistic crying to work. Dias' vocal performance at the end of Inside Out is phenomenal, and it just so happens that she has brilliant animators to help translate it to us completely. There's no doubt that seeing Riley's face slouch into the tears of missing Minnesota is key to our reaction to this scene, but it's the little crying sounds made by Dias, before she even starts getting her words out, that really start us on our path to the inevitable. Then her words just get us there at hyperspeed. 

9) Marceline Rofit in Tanna. When I started watching a movie about a star-crossed romance between indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, I anticipated experiencing the distance of being a westerner who might not otherwise relate to them perfectly well. Fortunately, great filmmaking bridges that empathy gap, and rarely do I remember it better bridged than in watching my #2 of 2016. Rofit plays a child who ends up having an unfortunate role in this star-crossed romance, and at one point we see her weeping while in hiding, ashamed of what she has brought about and overwhelmed with grief. I say "overwhelmed" not because Rofit overplays the scene, and for a non-professional actress, it's rather amazing that she does not (a credit to co-directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean). Her snuffling technique, otherwise wordless, hit me hard. (Again this is not exactly the right image, but the right image had the aforementioned watermark.)

10) Adele Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I am having trouble remembering when exactly the waterworks came in my #2 of 2019, whether there was an earlier episode or not until the climactic scene depicted here. But Haenel's quiet crying while watching a performance, at the remembrance of the relationship she did not quite have, is the accumulation of all the emotions that have been welling up in us over the past two hours, and it had this release effect on me. This image was actually on the banner of The Audient for a time, since it is also an audience member watching a performance, though not a movie in this case. (They hadn't been invented yet.)

That's a good place to stop I think. I got to my ten.

As I was scrolling through my top 500 movies on Flickchart, figuring that would give me a good reminder of the movies that had most gotten to me emotionally (even if not all the movies in that top ten are in my top 500), I noted a decent number of examples where I cried, but not because of someone else crying. These were moments of emotional generosity, a reconciliation, a sudden awareness of something unexpected and emotionally devastating, a farewell, things like that. So my idea that there has to be crying involved for me to cry was, thankfully, disproven.

I do feel that if an actor's primary goal is to translate what they are experiencing to the viewer, crying that makes the audience cry is one of the best indicators of success at their craft. I wrote a post on this blog, which I won't bother to link to now, about "yawn acting," and how you know an actor is good at their job if they can yawn in a movie and it makes the viewer yawn in real life. The idea being that only a genuine yawn is contagious, and so these actors are good enough to make their yawns look genuine.

I think yawning specifically may be a bad example, as yawning is suggestible enough that even as I am writing about it, I feel myself inclined to yawn. But that doesn't change my point, which is: crying is the hardest thing for an actor to do well. Some people can cry on cue, but they do it too demonstrably, making a show of it rather than giving us something emotionally relatable. Some people can't cry on cue, and a PA has to come with an eye dropper and simulate a tear sliding down the actor's face.

It's the actors who not only can cry on cue, but make the crying contagious -- who make us cry -- who are really doing God's work in bringing us the emotional fullness of the cinematic experience. And I've just discussed ten of them here. 

A Good Friday of New York favorites

We're on day two of a four-day weekend for Easter, and for some reason, I view these long weekends as a way to take a deep dive back into my collection of personal favorites. I already started on Thursday night with Moon for my 2022 #1s series, then Friday night, it was the double feature of other American DVDs I can suddenly watch now that I've reclaimed my old laptop as a region 1 DVD player, as discussed in yesterday's post. 

I've always made a connection in my mind between Kissing Jessica Stein and The Guru. For most people, it seems, these were throwaway romantic comedies that they immediately forgot about the moment the credits rolled, if they saw them at all. For me, they were sneakily emotional, feel-good favorites that both landed in my top ten of their respective years, which happened to be consecutive years in 2002 and 2003. (Actually, now that I look at it, I can see The Guru was only #11, but I now like it better than all but three of the movies that were ahead of it.)

I'd had occasion to think of both movies in recent months. The Guru, of course, was one of my inspirations for watching Bollywood movies this year, and I name-checked it in my introduction post for Audient Bollywood. Then I mentioned Kissing Jessica Stein in my recent post about Everything Everywhere All at Once, when I talked about movie characters overcoming their prejudices, specifically related to embracing the LGBTQI+ people in their lives. This movie has just about the most moving example of that for me -- not because the gesture is so great or unexpected, but simply because of the performance given by Tovah Feldshuh in that moment.

Other than a new viewing of both being overdue -- I hadn't seen either in more than ten years, and in fact last saw both in a six-month period from September 2010 to March 2011 -- and other than them both being on a DVD format I could now access, I had additional reasons to program them both for a Good Friday double feature on my projector. Let's look at some other similarities between these films:

1) Both are set in New York. That's likely a key to why I loved them so much. I lived in New York from 1998 to 2001, getting out just six months before 9/11. Since these movies both came out less than two years after 9/11, I'm sure they helped me experience a romanticized notion of New York that particularly helped me at that time.

2) Both are sex positive. Heather Graham's porn star in The Guru is not the least bit stigmatized for her career choice, either by the other characters or the film itself, and everyone associated with the porn shoots we see is pretty much a sweetheart. She beats herself up, but nobody else does. Jessica celebrates sex of all kinds -- hetero, gay and lesbian (making a distinction between a gay male couple and a gay female couple in the film). Which leads to ...

3) Both are gay positive. It's right there in the text of Jessica, and as alluded to just now, Helen's also good friends with two men in a relationship. But The Guru has a gay subplot as well, as Graham's character's fiancee (Dash Mihok) doesn't actually want to marry her because he's in love with a fellow firefighter (Bobby Cannavale). Then there's the trans character, long before we were really dealing with that in the culture, who works as a fluffer on the porn shoot. Played by Dwight Ewell, not only is she wonderfully supportive to Graham's Sharona, but she's also got one of the best lines in the movie: "I'm more woman than you'll ever have, pencil dick."

4) Both have exactly one scene that takes place in an Indian restaurant. Seriously! Jimi Mistry's Ramu works at an Indian restaurant when he first arrives in New York, getting fired from the gig when he pours chicken tikka masala over the head of an abusive customer, who denies the authenticity of the dish while speaking to Ramu in an accent that would make The Simpsons' Apu blush. And Indian is where Jessica and Helen go for dinner after the couple drinks they have on their blind date, when Helen finally convinces Jessica not to bolt in the nearest taxi. 

5) Both are directed by people with really long names: Daisy von Scherler Mayer for The Guru and Charles Herman-Wurmfeld for Jessica. In fact, both names have exactly 21 letters. Given their evident abilities, both should have had busy careers but I'm sorry to say that didn't end up being the case.

6) And speaking of that, both films are fronted by an actor -- the title character, in fact -- whose charisma and acting chops suggested they should have had much longer careers. Alas, I can count on one hand the times I've seen Jennifer Westfeldt or Jimi Mistry turn up in another film. Mistry at least popped up in Blood Diamond, Ella Enchanted, 2012 and RockNRolla, but never in a big role. IMDB says he has 37 acting credits overall, but again, no starring roles. For Westfeldt the pickin's were slimmer: only 30 credits, with only one other film credit I've seen, 2011's Friends With Kids -- though she had to both direct and write it to get cast in the main role, and the attempt to reproduce Jessica Stein was not a success. She also had a recurring role in one season of 24, though I've forgotten that.

More informally, both films give me a sense of joy that few other romantic comedies can touch, resulting from a perfect combination of writing, tone, structure and cast. (I haven't even mentioned that The Guru also has personal favorite Marisa Tomei.) The best evidence of this is that even though it was almost 11:30 when I started watching Jessica, I didn't come close to falling asleep.

I used to proselytize for these movies whenever I could, with whoever would listen. But now it's been 20 years since they were made, and I'm not sure if I can easily find either of them beyond my own region 1 DVDs. In fact, it's been more than 20 years, as Jessica has the year 2001 in its closing credits, while The Guru has the year 2002, though they were both released theatrically the year after that.

Well, if you're reading this and you haven't seen either movie, I hope you can find them, because it might be too far for you to travel to come watch them in my garage in Australia. I mean, if you only like arthouse films and documentaries, maybe skip them. But if you think the romantic comedy can be cinema's greatest genre when done correctly, when tweaking familiar tropes to give them new freshness, when finding just the right actors to speak just the right words, then you owe it to yourself to seek these two movies out.

And if you feel a natural fondness for a New York that may no longer be, and maybe never was, then all the more reason. 

Chinese mothers should talk to their daughters, and other Everything Everywhere All at Once thoughts

I couldn't help noticing, when I watched an advanced screening of the 4.5 star Everything Everywhere All at Once on Thursday, that it bore a remarkable similarity to the most recent 2022 4.5 star movie I saw the weekend before. That would be Turning Red, Pixar's latest.

Both movies deal, using a huge amount of metaphorical and fantastic imagery, with the communication breakdown between immigrant Chinese mothers living in North America, and their more westernized daughters. 

The age of the daughters differ. Red's Meilin is supposed to be 13, while the actress playing Everything's Joy, Stephanie Hsu, is 31 years old, though Joy's age is never mentioned. 

The conflicts, though, are very similar. In both cases, the more traditional mother cannot accept her daughter's desire to step outside of the limited range of what's expected of her -- in one case a heightened interest in a boy band, in the other, because she's a lesbian. And both inherited their own strictness from the generation before, a mother in one case and a father in the other.

It's just funny to see such a similar theme explored in the same week in two very different sorts of movies that immediately became my favorite and second-favorite movies of 2022, though which is which may be something I can't truly decide for a while yet. (Plus, both could well be eclipsed by other movies as we go along.)

Here are some other thoughts from my first advanced screening since early December:

Security on patrol

As I was walking into the screening, a large bald man in a suit with a big smile said something to me, which was surely related to the confidentiality requirements during the screening -- no use of your phone, etc. I didn't hear exactly what he said but was happy enough to nod along to it, knowing it would be conditions I could agree to, much as I sign various user agreements without reading all the fine print. (Most recently on our agreement with the person who will market our home in Los Angeles. Yeesh.)

Despite his big smile and friendly demeanor, that man took the security very seriously in this movie.

Now, I'm not really sure what he was trying to prevent. Is it really a thing anymore where people try to record a movie on their phone so they can sell a bootleg copy of it later on? His militant desire not to see any phone screens light up during the movie was certainly not just to protect the undisturbed enjoyment of the other patrons. 

How militant? He walked the aisles at least a half-dozen times during the movie, a sort of hulking deterrent who didn't mind if he were providing the same sort of viewer distraction that would be provided by the peripheral sight of a mobile phone screen in use. And when one phone did go on during the movie, he walked right over to that person and snuffed it out.

Needless to say, my own phone was conspiring to run me afoul of him. 

I tend to forget during Thursday night viewings that I have an alarm that's set to go off at 6:45 to tell me to take out the garbage cans. It used to be on Sunday night at my old house, and caused the same sort of problem then.

Namely, the supremacy of the alarm is considered to be such that it powers on the phone just to let you know it's going off. There is likely a setting I could adjust so it wouldn't do this, but I haven't adjusted that setting yet, and besides, there might be situations where I'd want to preserve the battery, but I'd want the phone to power on at a designated time.

That designated time is not 30 minutes into a movie, when not only does the alarm go off and power on the phone, but while you're trying to shut the phone down again, all the other audible notifications that have been waiting while the phone was off have to chirp out to you. At least the sound of the alarm itself is a peaceful one.

As I tried in vain to power the phone back off again, I noticed the security guard eyeing me. Given how quickly he later squelched the other phone user, I was surprised my frustrated wrestling with my phone didn't draw him over. But because I didn't want to draw him over, I eventually lost the wrestling match, and instead of getting the phone to shut off again, which requires holding down a button for longer than you should need to, I hastily stuffed it in my backpack, where I hoped at least the lining of the bag would smother future noisy emissions.

So annoyed was I by this that it kind of ruined my next five minutes of the film, and for a minute I worried I wouldn't recover my equanimity. Fortunately, this movie is good enough -- and it's one of those movies that gets better, rather than worse, the longer it goes -- that my mental order was soon restored.

Ke Huy Quan returns

I can't remember, if I ever knew, why the erstwhile Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data from The Goonies gave up acting, but presumably it had something to do with him no longer being a cute young kid, and the movies no longer welcoming him after a certain point. In any case, he has no credits whatsoever between 2002 and 2021. 

Well welcome back, Ke Huy Quan.

It was lovely to see the boyish charm still present in this 50-year-old man. He's still got the same voice we remember from those movies, he's still got a ton of energy, and he still makes you smile. 

He's also sort of this film's secret weapon. Michelle Yeoh is its main weapon, and awesome secondary weapons include the aforementioned Hsu, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis as we've never seen her before. But I don't think this would be the delight it is without Quan.

Is it too late for him to cameo in the next Indiana Jones movie?

The easiest way to get me

This is not giving anything away about the movie, not anything you probably couldn't guess yourself, but I'll be vague about it anyway.

If you really want to bring me to the edge of waterworks, all you have to do is get a character to renounce their previous prejudices.

I suppose this is true in multiple spheres, but I notice it most often when a character gets over their intolerance of homosexuality, as happens in this movie.

You'd think I were gay or something, with the way I'm always pushed to and beyond the threshold between not crying and crying when a character embraces the LQBTQI person in their life. Except that I don't have to be, because cinema is that empathy machine that Roger Ebert described, where you can put yourself in the shoes of others, and vicariously experience the powerful emotion they would be feeling in that moment.

One of the most powerful instances I can think of this happening is in Kissing Jessica Stein -- which, if we're being honest, is really a heterosexual movie masquerading as a gay movie. That doesn't change the power of a moment where Tovah Feldshuh's character is comforting her daughter, played by star Jennifer Westfeldt, and her voice hitches for a moment as it becomes clear she understands something we didn't know she knew: her daughter has been seeing a woman. "I think she seems like a very nice girl," she says. 

I'm getting verklempt. Please, go talk amongst yourselves.

I don't think the moment or moments in Everything Everywhere All at Once are as profound or as smartly executed, but that just shows you what an easy target I am.

Daniels are back

This film is directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who directed a previous top ten movie for me, 2016's Swiss Army Man. I obviously loved that at the time for how far it went outside the box of our expectations, and still feel fondly toward it even though it couldn't maintain that high level for me on the second viewing.

Everything Everywhere All at Once has the same sort of rule-shattering craziness in it, and though the core questions are perhaps a bit more traditional than those in Swiss Army Man, the execution is equally joyous, colorful, surprising and hilarious. 

I realized while watching it that these guys made a movie in between, The Death of Dick Long in 2019, and I never really heard anything about it, nor noticed it playing in a theater near me. It apparently wasn't a dud, either, as Wikipedia shows the movie having a 74% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Guess I better seek that out, as any chance to luxuriate in their distinct cinematic vision is a good one. 

My top five gay romances in film

It was a good day in Australia yesterday.

Although marriage equality was not passed, the results of a non-binding postal vote were indeed read. And that vote told the politicians, who would actually have the power to legalize gay marriage in Australia, that the citizens themselves are not opposed to the idea.

Sixty-one percent of those who responded to the vote, in fact, felt this way. After Brexit and Trump, someone finally stuck it to the right wing.

Having missed various landmark moments in the U.S. fight to legalize gay marriage, I've decided to use this symbolic moment instead to post my top five gay romances in film.

Unfortunately, given the traditionally straight-leaning tendencies of cinematic history and my own viewing patterns -- there's plenty of queer cinema out there, but I only actively seek out the most prominent examples -- some of my choices may seem like fairly flimsy examples of compelling gay relationships. Either they are not central to the movie, or they are not the first thing you notice about that particular movie. And there may be some obvious examples I am excluding, either because I thought they were too obvious or because they just don't happen to hit my personal sweet spot. (Much as I like it, Brokeback Mountain is kind of an example of both.)

But this is what I've chosen, and I hope some of these qualify as personal sweet spots for you as well.

Listed alphabetically by title of the movie:

1) But I'm a Cheerleader (2000, Jamie Babbitt) - Megan & Graham

I had occasion to praise this film only a few weeks back on this blog when I revisited it for the first time in a decade. It was my most obvious candidate for this list, as it tells the story of lesbian-in-denial Megan (Natasha Lyonne) and lesbian-in-full-flower Graham (Clea Duvall), who discover their love for each other at a camp intended to cure them of their homosexuality. Not only is the development of their relationships sweet and disarmingly free from cynicism, but it culminates (spoiler alert!) in my favorite homosexual variation on that scene at the end of most romances where the guy completes a grand gesture in order to win the girl back. As it turns out, a girl and a girl can do this too.

2) Confetti (2006, Debbie Isitt) - Archie & Gregory

This mockumentary about a reality show in which people compete to stage the most original themed wedding would seem to focus on the three heterosexual couples competing on the show. But at the true center of the film is the two men helping plan all three weddings, who are also romantic partners. Vincent Franklin and Jason Watkins each play the character Christopher Guest would have played if he'd made this movie, but roles that seem to have been written as comic relief take on real heft as the film becomes sneakily emotional. As the two wedding planners succumb to stress and the emotional toll of the task they're involved in, the strength of their own relationship is emphasized amid the revelation that the others in question don't have nearly their solid foundation.

3) Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, Mike Newell) - Gareth & Matthew

My second straight choice in which the gay couple is tellingly looking in from the outside on multiple weddings. Only after Gareth (Simon Callow) has died at one of these weddings do the characters in his social group, who had previously thought themselves all hopelessly single, acknowledge that Gareth and Matthew (John Hannah) were for all intents and purposes married. They modestly yield the spotlight to others, but when it's time to honor his passed partner, Matthew takes the moment and delivers one of the most heartfelt and memorable poetic eulogies in film. It's because I love this movie so much that I can nearly recite W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues."

4) Love is Strange (2014, Ira Sachs) - Ben & George

Ben (Alfred Molina) and George (John Lithgow) are the one couple on my list who do get to marry -- and it ruins them. The pictures of his wedding on social media cause Ben to lose his teaching job at an uptight private school, which had been keeping the couple afloat in their expensive New York apartment. Once they must sell and look for other arrangements, they are forced apart by the prejudices of society and the realities of finance, though their love and affection for one another never wavers. Theirs is a mature love that insists on focusing on the positive and proceeding forward without regret, as these two old souls seem to exchange glances that say, unmistakably, "This is the way the world goes."

5) Philadelphia (1993, Jonathan Demme) - Andy & Miguel

We don't get to see Andy Beckett (Tom Hanks) and his lover Miguel (Antonio Banderas) together all that often in this movie, as the focus of the movie is (rightly) Andy's legal battle to retain his job and his relationship with the lawyer (Denzel Washington) he hires to represent him. But their few scenes together are powerhouses, demonstrating the type of unconditional love of which most straight couples could only dream. Even though it was Andy cheating on Miguel that infected him with AIDS, and that that infidelity could have even infected Miguel with the virus, Miguel is fiercely loyal toward his lover and at his bedside, literally and figuratively, during every stage of his decline. If they don't have the "in sickness and in health" part of marriage down, I don't know who does.

Honorable mentions:

1) Kissing Jessica Stein (2002, Charles Herman-Wurmfeld) - Jessica & Helen

I felt bad having only one female couple on here, but Jessica couldn't quite crack my top five for the slight problem that its title character is really a heterosexual experimenting with homosexuality. But I love this movie and the relationship between these characters is sweet and honest.

2) Flirting With Disaster (1996, David O. Russell) - Paul & Tony

Got to get a straight (to use the word loosely) comedy on here. You wouldn't at first think this movie contains the most forward portrayal of a gay relationship, but there's something so easy and comfortable about the relationship of the two buttoned-up ATF agents who join the wacky road trip at the center of this movie.

As gay marriage moves closer to being the law of the land everywhere in the world -- though it may take some countries another century to get there -- I hope that searching my list of favorite films won't produce so relatively few contenders for a list like this. But it stands to reason that the more it's accepted, the more we'll see more movies featuring both central and side gay relationships ... as many as possible of which will end in marriage.