This movie gets mentioned on so many “Best Romantic Movies” lists that you would think it’s just another Notebook or anything with the name Nicholas Sparks slapped on it, but I’m telling you it’s legit. I know it’s easy to turn our noses up or scoff at the idea of movies that are just sweet and delightful and pluck whatever emotional strings we have beneath our hardened exteriors. But there are some movies that deserve to have exceptions made for them. This is one of those.
Maybe it’s easier to enjoy than I’m giving it credit for. On paper, I don’t know how anyone can describe it other than what it is: two cute youngsters staying up all night in Vienna talking and getting to know each other and being completely adorbs. But it’s like, you know those times when you just have a good conversation with someone that you don’t know super well, and it goes on for far longer than you would have predicted and longer than you even realized because it went by so quickly? And was so enjoyable? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie capture that experience the way this one does. How director Richard Linklater is able to accomplish this will always be a mystery to me. Listening to them talk and watching them just wandering around the city doing boring stuff is just endlessly fun for some reason. And then they went and did it again 9 years later in the follow-up Before Sunset and, apparently, once more in one of this year’s Sundance hits, Before Midnight, due out in May.
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Published: Feb 14, 2013 12:13 pm