Offbeat romantic movies that are underrated - Part 2

Kirk Boxleitner | Feb 10, 20220

A few days remain before Valentine’s Day, so since we gave you six films last week, here are eight more, so you can enjoy 14 offbeat romantic movies through Feb. 14.

‘Pump Up the Volume’

Christian Slater is an anonymous, foul-mouthed pirate radio DJ who can’t work up the nerve to speak out as provocatively in his daily life as a high school student and new kid in town, until he connects with an inquisitive and insightful classmate, played by Samantha Mathis, who’s written him filthy letters as an adoring and equally depraved fan.

While the film’s profanity and unsubtle political statements are confrontational, its more low-key moments depict the teen years as a paradoxical period of shared loneliness, with even its boldest characters hiding behind microphones, telephones and handwriting to give voice to what they can’t say face-to-face.

This 1990 film showcases what’s still the best acting performance of Slater’s career, and in an era of pervasive social media and online discourse, its portrayal of the communal yet faceless isolation of adolescence remains as relevant as ever.

‘L.A. Story’

This 1991 film aspired to be a singular sendup of all the narcissistic absurdities of Los Angeles in the late ’80s to early ’90s, with Steve Martin presiding over its broad satire with a droll touch. But somewhere along the way, it becomes an affecting and even spiritual exploration of what it means to love someone.

Martin’s character is tired of his meaningless life as a “wacky” TV meteorologist in a city so sunny it renders weathermen useless, until he starts receiving messages from a freeway traffic sign that seem to be life advice specifically intended for him.

Sarah Jessica Parker elicits big laughs as a shamelessly shallow young model named “SanDeE*” (yes, with that exact spelling, capitalization and a “star at the end”) with whom Martin hooks up. But we see his plaintive yearning for something more profound with a London journalist played by Victoria Tennant (his real-life wife at the time), all while we’re treated to the ethereal music of Enya and observations such as, “A kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true.”

‘Dead Again’

Hey, it’s Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson back when they were a celebrity power couple, with Derek Jacobi in a supporting role … in a film that’s not a Shakespeare adaptation? And is that a random appearance by Robin Williams? What’s going on?

“Dead Again” is a head-trip of a neo-noir murder mystery, complete with amnesia, hypnosis, reincarnation, memories of past lives and the recurring imagery of lethal scissors, but for all its plot twists and red herrings, its central questions are these:

Are our fates determined? Are our underlying natures fixed (and therefore unfixable)? If two souls have fallen in love before, can they change how things will work out between them in their next lives? Or are they doomed to repeat the same tragic outcomes?

I won’t spoil the plot of this 1991 supernatural psychodrama, despite its age, because its constant switchbacks will keep new viewers on their toes. Branagh, Thompson and Jacobi all lend the proceedings an outsized operatic air, and Williams is morbid, and laugh-out-loud hilarious, in a role that feels like his character just accidentally wandered onto set from a different film.

‘True Romance’

Christian Slater returns to this list as a Detroit comic bookstore clerk who has hallucinatory conversations with Elvis (played by an obscured but unmistakable Val

Kilmer), but it’s Patricia Arquette who steals the show, and our hearts, as a Tallahassee call girl named Alabama.

After the cutest of 1993’s cinematic meet-cutes, our couple hits the road to unload a suitcase full of drugs from Alabama’s dead pimp and stay one step ahead of the mob and the cops.

Slater has never been cooler, Arquette has never been more adorable, and their love affair remains endearing and earnest, even as each plot twist grows ever more improbable and adrenaline-driven, thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s crackerjack script and the sharklike momentum of Tony Scott’s direction.

The supporting cast is insanely overqualified, but watch out for James Gandolfini, six years before “The Sopranos,” as a hauntingly meditative hitman.

‘The Crow’

I’ve mostly opted for films that feature their romances in the present tense, and relatively central to the plot, with fairly uplifting resolutions.

The romantic relationship in 1994’s “The Crow” is over before the film even starts, as Eric Draven and his fiancée, Shelly Webster, are left for dead on Devil’s Night in Detroit, the day before their wedding — “Who the f___ gets married on Halloween anyhow?” “Nobody” — and one year before Eric returns from the dead as the Crow.

But the emotional heft of Brandon Lee’s performance as Eric is how he invests every gesture with an encompassing grief over having lost the one person in the world he loved the most.

Whether he’s playing the Crow as vengeful or remorseful, Lee comes across at every moment as bone-tired just from the effort of being alive.

You see it in the smallest details, such as when the deeply underrated Ernie Hudson, as the one cop on his side, asks whether he’s going to vanish into thin air again. When Lee replies, “I thought I’d use your front door,” his voice is practically choking back sobs, and his eyes are glassy with unshed tears.

This is a man whose lost love has left him hurting so much that you feel relieved for him when he’s finally able to lay down and die a second time.

Besides being tragically romantic, “The Crow” is also a perfect Halloween film, so like 1993’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” it’s seasonally versatile.

‘The Fifth Element’

Writer-director Luc Besson delivered in 1997 what should have been the live-action sequel to the 1981 animated classic “Heavy Metal,” transporting us to a far-future outer space packed with enough background mythology for a dozen sci-fi franchises.

An evil force prophesied by the ancient Egyptians has returned from the far reaches of the cosmos to destroy Earth in the 23rd century. All that stands in its way are a shell-shocked war veteran turned taxi driver named Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis marks “The Return of Bruno” to this list) and a girl without a past named Leeloo (the ethereal Milla Jovovich) who tells him she’s “The Fifth Element” of legend.

This is one of the few action-romance films where both halves of the couple pull equal duty in fighting scenes and emotional breakdowns. Jovovich’s Leeloo is a flawless combatant who is nonetheless horrified by war, and Willis’ Korben Dallas is a reflexively effective soldier who has to get over his own emotional damage to open his heart to Leeloo.

And acclaimed French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz has a hilariously random cameo as an inventive but ill-fated mugger.

‘Ever After: A Cinderella Story’

As a decade, the 1990s wore its revisionary spirit on its sleeve. This radical reinterpretation of “Cinderella” from 1998 makes its motives clear by setting the age-old fairy tale in Renaissance-era France and transforming its put-upon servant girl turned princess into a self-rescuing damsel in distress, whom we see espousing ideas that would have been almost anachronistically progressive for that time.

Years before Disney’s direct-to-video animated sequels did the same in the 2000s, Drew Barrymore’s Cinderella successfully redeems one of her two “ugly stepsisters,” played by future “Yellowjackets” star Melanie Lynskey, even as her wicked stepmother (Anjelica Huston, clearly having the time of her life in the role) and her other stepsister are consigned to a deservingly dire fate for their mistreatment of her.

And Barrymore’s Cinderella not only effects her own release, after being sold to a lecherous old landowner played by Richard O’Brien (“Say hello, Riff!”), but she also broadens the mind of her Prince Charming (almost-Wolverine Dougray Scott).

All this, and we get to see Leonardo da Vinci (no, really) make this Cinderella’s gossamer-winged dress for the ball.

‘Warm Bodies’

When I heard this 2013 film described as “Twilight” with zombies instead of vampires, I must admit I gritted my teeth. But what I actually got when I watched it was a delightfully canny, moving twist on “Romeo and Juliet” that manages to justify its “Power of Love” ending.

In the years since he starred in 2002’s “About A Boy,” Nicolas Hoult has learned how to weaponize his alien strangeness into a winningly guileless charm. He puts this to good use as a zombie named “R,” who’s understandably discontented with the ennui of his existence, not to mention “conflicted about” those he’s killed, when his heart literally starts beating again after he falls in love with a human girl named Julie, played by Teresa Palmer.

Just as zombie plagues spread like viruses, so too does the resurgence of life and human emotions start to spread through the zombies, as a result of the love that grows between R and Julie.

Bonus points to Rob Corddry as R’s zombie best friend “M,” and Lio Tipton as Julie’s friend Nora, both of whom supply plenty of laughs on the side (“Now you’re supposed to say ‘I’m pretty too.’ ”)