The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) 2000s Romance Movies

The 5 Best (& 5 Worst) 2000s Romance Movies

No matter how cliche or corny, audiences love a good Hollywood romance. The 2000s had some gems like Brokeback Mountain, but also duds like Gigli.

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No matter how much Hollywood trends have changed over the years — musicals and westerns have come and gone, while the superhero genre’s days are surely numbered — love stories have always been in demand. From the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks to the never-ending slew of Nicholas Sparks adaptations, romance movies never fail to attract an audience.

Moviegoers have big hearts, and there’s a cathartic joy in watching two characters find each other and fall in love. The 2000s brought both great and terrible romance movies to audiences. Here are the five best and five worst from the decade.

10 Best: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)

Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the ultimate breakup movie, and breakup movies are just as important as movies about budding romances and lavish weddings.

Jim Carrey stars as a depressed, heartbroken man who hires a company to conduct an experimental procedure to remove the memories of his ex-girlfriend, played by Kate Winslet, from his mind. It’s a surreal, beautiful, emotionally resonant piece of cinema.

9 Worst: The Ugly Truth (2009)

Robert Luketic’s The Ugly Truth is a movie about the worst kind of female character type falling in love with the worst kind of male character type. The female lead (Katherine Heigl) is an uptight, high-maintenance TV producer working on a morning show segment about relationships, while the male lead (Gerard Butler), the host of the show, is a brazen misogynist.

8 Best: (500) Days Of Summer (2009)

A lot of people missed the point of this movie entirely. (500) Days of Summer is a whip-smart subversion of the usual rom-com tropes, but only if you don’t fall for Tom’s charms. Since it’s told from Tom’s perspective, it can be easy to identify with his point of view and feel bad for him, but he acts selfishly and unreasonably throughout his relationship with Summer.

He goes into the relationship with rose-tinted glasses, knowing that she’s not into the whole “love” thing, and then resents her for not totally changing her personality to suit his fantasy of her.

7 Worst: Pearl Harbor (2001)

For whatever reason, Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney thought it would be a good idea to give Michael Bay a budget of $140 million to tell the story of one of the greatest tragedies in American history.

There are plenty of incredible true stories through which to frame the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but Bay decided to focus his movie on a generic, made-up Hollywood love triangle.

6 Best: Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

When Paul Thomas Anderson told an interviewer that he wanted to make his next movie after Magnolia with Adam Sandler in the lead role, people thought he was joking. But lo and behold, his next movie was a romantic dramedy called Punch-Drunk Love, starring Sandler, and it was a cerebral, emotionally charged masterpiece.

Barry and Lena are not your average Hollywood romcom couple. They’re a lot more realistic than that, as Barry suffers from serious emotional problems (which offers a subversively dramatic take on Sandler’s usual schtick), and it makes the movie so much more engaging and beautiful.

5 Worst: P.S. I Love You (2007)

Adapted from Cecelia Ahern’s debut novel of the same name (with the Irish setting switched out for Manhattan), P.S. I Love You revolves around a widow receiving letters from her dead husband as she tries to move on from his death.

Hilary Swank is wildly miscast in the lead role, while Gerard Butler’s Irish accent (which he has since joked about) is extremely poor.

4 Best: Before Sunset (2004)

Between 1995’s Before Sunrise and 2013’s Before Midnight, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprised their respective roles as Jesse and Céline in 2004’s Before Sunset. Nine years after their romantic night in Vienna, they share a romantic afternoon in Paris.

Director Richard Linklater’s close collaboration with Hawke and Delpy on the screenplay allowed for organic developments to their characters and the relationship they share.

3 Worst: The Wedding Planner (2001)

Years before the McConaissance would make him a respected actor, Matthew McConaughey starred in a bunch of dreadful romantic comedies. Perhaps the worst of all is The Wedding Planner.

McConaughey stars opposite Jennifer Lopez as the most boring man ever conceived in a shallow rip-off of My Best Friend’s Wedding with a fraction of the charm.

2 Best: Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Many moviegoers felt that Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain deserved the Best Picture Oscar over Paul Haggis’ Crash. Crash is very heavy-handed in conveying its opinions about racial issues, but Brokeback Mountain isn’t an “issues” movie. It’s just a heartfelt, authentic love story that happens to center on the love between two men.

It doesn’t buck the unfortunate trend of gay romances ending in tragedy, mainly due to its historical context, but it did go a long way towards normalizing queerness in popular culture.

1 Worst: Gigli (2003)

Apparently, Martin Brest envisioned Gigli as a pitch-black comedy, but the studio forced him to water it down and play up the love story until it was a by-the-numbers slog, virtually unrecognizable from the original concept.

Gigli got a publicity boost from the fact that its stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez started dating in real life, but none of their romantic chemistry translated into the movie, which is a total dud.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/best-worst-2000s-romance-movies-brokeback-mountain-gigli/

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