and this makebelieve will get me through another lonely night...

I've been watching a lot of movies lately and I've noticed a trend. It started with romantic comedies and to be honest, I wasn't surprised, but then it showed up in action movies and thrillers and even the marvel comics films. And well, this may sound a little ridiculous, but LOVE is a major factor in all of the plots. Of all the movies I've watched in the past month, I think maybe only Kill Bill does not overtly use love as a motivating force. Now, I've thought about this for a while and at first I was super cynical. Its so cliche that "love has power" and "all you need is love". Maybe I'm being too harsh on love, but I just don't think that it can pull off all its given credit for. When I was watching "Ghost Rider" today, Nicholas Cage gets told that "a man who has the guts to sell his soul for love can change the world". I'm not sure I'm convinced, sorry Johnny Blaze. But then I started thinking about some very un-Hollywood versions of love. Despite the fact that its produced by a big name movie company, I thought about Love Actually. I think its a brilliant film about the nature of love and the human experience, and though I've already dissed the cheesy cliches, that "love actually is all around us". I thought about the movie Water and how subtly the idea of love gets worked out through the relationships there. And I thought about Amelie in all its quirky beauty and how the movement of the plot is pulled through all these twists and turns with such a lightness. Which in turn made me think of Closer and how it is so heavy and painfully broken but full of a rich kind of love that rips through the character's lives. Love is so ubiquitous and persistent in so many forms that its no wonder all of these movies are so focussed on it. Its such a same that it is so often relegated to being simply an emotion.