Where do I begin?..lalarararara....

Oliver Barrett IV: "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach, the Beatles, and me?"
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When I was a kid, I remember walking with my parents by Ponce De Leon Avenue and seeing the longest line I had ever seen outside a movie theater. It was the old Radio City theater in Santurce and the movie playing there was a romantic flick called "Love Story". This movie was one of the biggest movie phenomenoms of the early 1970's. The music became a huge hit. There were a million versions of that song. Over here, every tv singer sang "Love Story".

I had never seen the movie and to be honest I was never too interested in watching it. But last week it was playing in one of the HBO channels and I thought "what the hell. watch and try to understand what all the fuzz back in 1970 was all about."

And I watched it. And, it was pretty interesting. It is a tearjerker for sure. Every cliche in the book is in it. Well, not every cliche, when the woman gets terminally ill, she doesn't show it by suddenly coughing. And what about this "Love means never having to say you're sorry" line? What on earth does that mean?

But you know what? I liked it. Because it was unashamed to be a simple, by the numbers, love story. Imagine this , mega rich Harvard guy meets poor, but proud Radcliffe girl. They fall in love. He rebels against his snobbish parents and marries her. They live a modest but happy life. And then she gets terminally ill.

But the movie is more than that. It as an artifact of its time. This was 1970, the Beatles had split, the 1960's had gone all wrong, the dream of Woodstock was destroyed by the reality of Altamont, Kent State and the Vietnam War. It must have been a pretty depressing time. And here was this, boy meets girl story with a sappy ending. A reassuring movie for a restless, insecure time.