The power of love can be a very potent thing that can overcome barriers of status, race, religion and hardships. While romantic dramas and comedies help us to fall in love, there are also stories that use love as the perfect premise to emphasise the more extraordinary qualities and circumstances that bring people together. For this Valentine's Day, if your partner ever asks how much you love them, here are 5 movies that you can refer to what you will do for them.
When they say love is eternal, it can also mean that it can last through different places in time, and that is put to the test in Robert Schwentke's adaptation of "The Time Traveller's Wife". Eric Bana is a Chicago librarian from the 1970s who discovers that he has an abnormal genetic disorder that allows him to travel through time and space, although without much control. On his travels, he cultivates a relationship turned into a romance with a young girl who grows up to be Rachel McAdams, as their love becomes a more gruelling version of a long-distance relationship that extends into time and space. Time-traveling and romance is an explosive mix of illogical time paradoxes and incontrollable hormones and has had several iterations over the past years (see "About Time", and "Kate and Leopold"), but they haven't taken this premise to its extreme as far as "The Time Traveller's Wife" had gone.
Adam and Eden are inhabitants in a unique world with dual gravities where people live on different sides of their own gravity. Adam comes from the destitute side of the world of Down Below and Eden is from the high society of Up Top. Keeping their relationship a secret from both societies where making contact, let alone having a romantic bond, with people from the other side is a violation of legal and natural laws, Adam eventually decides to reunite with Eden through a special recipe that allows a person to be forced onto the other's gravity. Sometimes love doesn't have to be the setting, but it can certainly be the driver of a story set in an otherwise outrageous setting. Director Juan Diego Solanas' creates a high concept world with some impressive visuals to the unappreciated couple of Jim Sturgess and Kristen Dunst that cannot be tore away by gravity itself.
When Kate leaves a note inside the mail box of the glass lake house she is about to leave, it is picked up by Alex who lived in the same lake house but exactly 2 years ago. When both of them slowly discover of the time difference between them and connected by the letters they sent each other through the mail box, Kate and Alex decide to meet by closing the time gap between them. This Alejandro Agresti remake of the Korean romantic drama "Il Mare" shows that love letters don't go out of style, even if it takes an oddly inexplicable way of reaching the people we are destined with, and could even saving your life; just like how that Huey Lewis and The News song goes about the power of love.
Sam Wheat is a banker and girlfriend Molly Jensen is a potter. When Sam is killed in mugging, Sam's ghost does not go into the afterlife. After seeing the suffering that Molly is going through, he communicates with her through a psychic who hints that Sam's death may not be as accidental as it was. Love lasts till death do us part until you have seen Jerry Zucker's seminal piece on why pottery is so sexy, especially with a ghostly boyfriend like Patrick Swayze. While the thought of being haunted by a dead lover who comes back as a spectral lover sounds like the perfect setup for a vengeful horror flick, it was the most outrageously acceptable love story in 1990, not only becoming the most commercially successful love story at the box office that year, but even garnering Oscar nominations for Best Picture, and making Whoppi Goldberg an Oscar-winner.
A country girl, Mitsuha, and a city boy in Tokyo, Taki, find themselves experiencing each other's lives in their respective bodies, causing miscommunication and misunderstanding to those around them, but also slowly learning to appreciate what each other are going through. When the two decide to meet in their own bodies, they find that their out-of-body experience may have been destined for something else. From body-swapping comedy to spiritual romance, the premise for "Kimi no Na Wa" is as outrageous as the emotional payoff that comes with it. "Kimi no Na Wa" takes its form from some of the most cliché and outlandish premises from any of the movies we've mentioned on this list, but also due to the credence of its director and writer Makoto Shinkai, it still manages to pull the heart-tugging strings with sentimentality and sublime animations that he is a master at weaving them together.