Hi and thank you for joining me on the blog today! I would like to bring to you some of the movies I love. Some of them are really old and I haven't seen in years, so the plot is a bit fuzzy.
My goal is to bring these movies to your attention if you haven't heard of them, although most of them are classics. If you haven't heard of them, I'd be surprised, but just in case you haven’t, I would love to bring them to you and encourage you to check them out because they’re absolutely wonderful.
Many of them are really sad, but they’re full of love and teachings, really.
There’s many I would like to talk about so I have a long list.
I will start with Candy. It’s a movie from 2006, with Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish and it’s the movie after which I absolutely felll in love with Heath Ledger, not that I didn’t like him before as an actor, but this movie is absolutely heart wrenching, it’s a story about addiction and love. This what the IMDB site has listed about it briefly:
“A poet falls in love with an art student who gravitates to his bohemian lifestyle and his love of heroin.”
Candy is also a play on the name because it’s the name of the female main character, but it also has to do with the addiction for heroin.
“Hooked as much on one another as they are on the drug, their relationship alternates between states of oblivion, self-destruction and despair.”
It’s an absolutely heartbreaking movie and the reason why I love Heath Ledger for this movie, when I think Heath Ledger I instantly think about this movie, not about his blockbusters for which he is obviously so well-known and loved. His portrayal of this human who battles with addiction, his performance is astonishing.
There’s also this tagline “More is never enough.”
Geoffrey Rush plays a professor in it and he also sort of acts as the supplier for the main male character played by Heath.There’s a line, a scene in the movie when he says something to the effect “When you can stop, you don’t want to, and when you want to, you can’t anymore.”
It’s a heart-cutting story, the portrayal of the couple and the things they have to struggle through and deal with (no pun intended) is absolutely powerful. There’s various scenes that can be very triggering if you’ve had (or still have) trouble with addiction, so please be aware of that.
I highly encourage you to see this movie. This one along with Brokeback Mountain, I believe are my favourite movies of Heath Ledger, but Candy in particular has forever put Heath on the map for me. He’s there to stay. Personally I think it’s one of his best movies. The story obviously helps because if you don’t have a good story, it’s hard to have a good performance, but his performance is stunning although I don’t believe he is so well-know for this portrayal which is why I wanted to bring it to your attention. You just really have to see it, it’s an absolutely heartbreaking and stunning movie. From what I remember the cinematography is not that top notch (although still pretty great) because it focuses on their addiction and what they go through, but yeah, there’s many things they touch on with this story and it’s worth watching at least once (To be fair, I don’t know if I would recommend watching it several times unless you’re studying how to write and make a movie because the story is extremely painful, but rings true and doesn’t shy away from things at all).
Call Me By Your Name by Luca Guadagnino is a movie adapted after Andre Aciman’s novel with the same name. This is one of my favourite stories, both in movie and book format. It’s a beautiful portrayal of first love. It’s about these two people, Elio and Oliver, they meet in Italy and over a summer they develop a beautiful relationship. I was worried about the adaptation because I loved the novel so much, but after watching it in the cinema, I loved the movie maybe even more than the novel. It is a stunning movie, the cinematography is beautifully shot, but the emotions portrayed...they absolutely make your hair stand on your arms. As mentioned, it’s about these two people who become a couple, briefly, over the course of a summer. It’s about all the heartache and doubt that comes with first love and feelings one has when you first fall in love with someone and are not sure if your feelings are mutual. But what I loved the most about this movie, unlike other ones about a relationship between the same sex characters, in this movie the characters are not persecuted for their love of one another, we just get to see how their relationship evolves and the portrayal of the father is one of the most, if not the best, stunning performances ever delivered on screen. After seeing this, you will wish you had this kind of discussion with your own parents. A beautiful portrayal of first love that really made me remember how it felt to love, or feel deeply for someone when I was younger. James Ivory received an Oscar for adapting the novel into a screenplay, it was a faithful adaptation, so yeah, it’s very highly regarded on my list of stories I love.
Another movie I love is Manchester by the Sea. After coming out of the movie theater I was crying and my heart was broken and felt like in a horribly tight grip. I felt for the main character played by Casey Affleck (who received an Oscar for this performance). It’s a movie I wouldn’t necessarily watch several times because once you know what happens, the magic, the suspense is slightly gone and is not as impactfull, but it’s still one of my top movies that have tremendously affected me. It’s actually one of my early youtube videos posted on my channel. It’s a heartbreaking movie about this guy who works as a janitor (Affleck) and finds out his brother passed away and he asked him to be the guardian of his son. Casey’s character is reluctant to doing that and we get to learn why he feels the way he feels. There’s a scene in a police section which made me cry, truly heartbreaking — a must watch.
Another book adapted after a novel which I love is Snow Falling on Cedars by David Gutterson. I’ve seen the movie when I was probably 10, if not younger, but why I still remember this story is because the main character is played by Ethan Hawke, one of my favourite actors. The story is about this man, this journalist (Hawke), who returns to his home town and this is after the events of Pearl Harbour and there’s frictions between the Americans and the Japanese people living on the island. It’s about this trial that takes place and the journalist assists. The Japanese man accused of the murder of a fisherman is the husband of the woman Ethan Hawke’s character was in love with and had a relationship with many years ago. We see the trial through his eyes and the stories goes back and forth showing the relationship between him and the woman and how he feels about all of it. I first saw the movie and then read the novel after I encountered a woman who was reading it and she recommended it to me claiming the novel was much better. Coming from a film background, I understand how difficult it is to bring a story to the screen so I’m always reluctant or dismissive when someone says that about a movie, but she seemed like a really nice lady so when I found the novel I read it and loved it as well. Ilike both versions, although I have seen the movie when I was much younger. I guess it would be interesting to watch the movie now and comparing them, but either way, I still think my feelings wouldn’t change towards the movie. The language of the novel is indeed beautiful — I still remember reading about the scent of strawberries and cedar on the island where the action takes place and the falling of the snow and how the seasons changed while the accused man waited in his cell and in the trial room. I remember the cinematography being stunning. This is a heartbreaking movie, but not to the same degree of Manchester by the Sea because this focuses on more issues like war and love and how people react depending on their emotions, and how truthful they are despite those painful emotions. The intensity of all these emotions goes to more places and doesn’t focus just on the drama of the main character, although that is what holds the story together. It’s most and foremost about being truthful, that was my main take on this movie.
Somewhere in Time, with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, is another movie I love. This has to do with time travel. It’s a beautiful love story about this playwright who’s celebrating one evening and, in a hall full a people, an old woman he doesn’t seem to know approaches him and asks him to come back to her. This is the movie I fell in love with Christopher Reeve and, just like with Heath Ledger, this movie has put him in my heart forever for playing that role of a true gentleman and bringing this beautiful story to the screen. Jane Seymour is gorgeous and plays a talented woman and really shines in this role. It is probably the role that has propelled her and made her memorable for the audience of movie lovers. While I have some trouble with time-travel movies because I always think about that butterfly effect, I was willing to accept it and go with the flow and really enjoy this bittersweet love story. Some found the ending sad, but I think it’s really what made it stand out from other romance movies and I believe it’s a perfect ending for the story.
If you want to find out what other movies I love and why, please check out the full video I made about this and uploaded on my youtube channel. I mention movies like The Butterfly Effect, Meet Joe Black, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Cold Mountain, Legends of the Fall, Hearts in Atlantis, Geronimo: An American Legend, Dead Poets Society, The Lake House, The Vanishing of Sydney Hall, Back Roads, Secret Window, The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, A Walk in the Clouds, A Beautiful Mind, Before Sunrise (part of The Before Trilogy directed by Richard Linklater) and some others.
My book Whispers and Other Strange Stories is still available and I’m looking forward to receiving more reviews and finding out what you personally think of it. Did you like the illustrations, were you spooked by the stories, did you have nightmares reading them, did they make you think about personal memories and peculiar things that have happened to you? Tell me about it, write me.
You can sign out for my newsletter as well if you want to stay in touch and find out more about my writing and stories I love. I am currently working on a new book about gender (in)equality, social media, and the strength to live — not just survive — despite tremendous exterior and interior noise. I have picked the names for the most important characters and I must mention, this naming thing really helps me write the story better. I am really excited about this story because it’s about many things that bother me in the society we currently live in and I’ve wanted to express opinions concerning those issues for many years now. I think this story will have a good impact on readers, and it will hopefully shake some people up, but that’s for the future to see. There’s still a long way to go until this will be ready to be published (I’m only about 19000 words in — and that’s raw written chapters and research notes all together). I’m looking forward to sharing more with you once I know more about it. ;)
Always a pleasure!
Sincerely,
Crina.
