They All Lived Happily Ever After...The End

I just want to say thanks to all of you who participated in my "Favorite Chick Flicks" poll! I must admit, the results weren't too surprising to me. :) I figured Pride & Prejudice and North & South would be the top favorites and I was correct! Some of you voted that you couldn't possibly come to such a conclusion as to which were your favorites, and I can totally understand that as well!

But anyway, I told you I would inform you which movies are my favorites when the poll was over, so here I go.

If I could only take 2 movies (one Austen and one Gaskell) with me on a trip, I would take Emma and Wives & Daughters.

Emma has recently been added to our video library, and it has quickly become a favorite of mine. I love the story, I love the humor, I love the dances, I love the dresses, and I love their hairstyles. In so many of these movies, the ladies' hairstyles are hideous, but in Emma, I thought they were quite pretty. I am definitely a big fan of Mr. Knightly, which is partly why I named my laptop "Mr. Knightly"! :) So, yes, that would be my favorite Jane Austen movie (at the moment!).

As far as Elizabeth Gaskell's movies, it was definitely a tougher decision for me. Wives & Daughters was my first Gaskell movie to ever watch, and I really like Molly's down-to-earth attitude. She doesn't go around trying to impress everyone she meets, and she truly cares about people. I especially like the father/daughter relationship in that movie between Molly and Mr. Gibson. His wife and Cynthia, however, pretty much drive me crazy! The reason I choose Wives & Daughters over North & South is because when I first watched North & South, I had absolutely no clue what was going on. The second time I watched it, I was with a bunch of my friends and they helped explain things to me. :) By the 3rd and 4th time, I think I pretty much got it! There isn't much color in the movie, so it made it seem like a rather drab and dreary movie to me at first. However, it is far from drab and dreary...the lack of color just fits the storyline perfectly. I guess another reason I don't consider that movie my top favorite is because of the guy who plays John Thorton. Oh, I thought he was great in North & South, but then I started watching the Robin Hood BBC series, and for awhile North & South had no appeal to me because I couldn't separate his role in Robin Hood from his role in N&S! Does that ever happen to you? You see an actor/actress in one movie and you can't stand their character, so when you watch them in another movie, you immediately assume they are going to act the same way?

I think the main reason I like these types of movies is because I know there will always be a happy ending. The miscommunication, challenges, tragedies, prejudices and other complicated circumstances throughout the movie may drive me crazy, but I can always be rest assured that in the end, all will be well and somehow, some way they will work everything out.

To me, movies are an escape from reality. I like knowing that no matter what, everything is going to work out just fine. The man and woman will eventually fall in love and live happily ever after- it's just a given! I like walking away from a movie with a happy feeling inside me.

However, yesterday afternoon I watched the movie Titanic for the first time ever. I had just been browsing through the channels, and came across it. At first I didn't know what I was watching, but it caught my attention because the main actress, Kate Winslet, is Marianne Dashwood from Sense & Sensibility. When I realized it was Titanic, I was tempted to turn it off because I knew there was going to be a sad ending, and I would be upset. However, I didn't listen to my gut feeling and kept on watching it. For awhile, it was great. It was like a typical romance movie - the girl has an evil boyfriend, another handsome guy walks into her life and saves her from evil boyfriend, and they all live happily ever after - right? Sadly, I knew this wouldn't be the case, and I was trying to brace myself for the tragic ending. Alayna came downstairs soon after the ship had been hit, and we watched the ending together. She was sobbing, and I was more sick to my stomach than anything. Movies really tug on the emotions, I'm telling you! I think what hit me the hardest when I saw all these people on this boat panicking, realizing that they were in big trouble, is that this situation REALLY happened. The Titanic tragedy was real. Of course, this movie was a fictional account with the love story and everything, but this was a factual occurrence. All those people really died.

I don't know the last time a movie has affected me as much as Titanic did. Seriously, I was like totally depressed for the rest of the day, still seeing the images of people in the frozen water, and replaying the ship going down over and over again in my mind. Let's just say, I won't be watching that movie again if I can help it! It was really well done, the actors were great and everything, the soundtrack was awesome, but give me happy (unrealistic!) ending movies any day over these sad, tragic endings!!!

I just can't handle it!