Welcome welcome welcome to Day 1 of the April A to Z Blog Challenge.  I’ll be participating by watching movies I’ve never seen before and telling you all about them.  I’m super excited, because I love movies and I love giving my opinion on things 🙂

To select my movies, I had a few simple criteria: 1) It had to be a movie I hadn’t seen before (duh) which meant I passed on a lot of movies I’ve seen once and wanted to watch again. 2) I wanted to be able to view for free so I could watch it easily at any time. This meant a few DVDs I’ve had on hand for a while but haven’t gotten around to, and a lot of Netflix. 3) I wanted to mix up genres and release years.  I didn’t want to exclusively watch classics or new-releases and I wanted to get out of my comfort zone in terms of the types of movies I normally watch. 4) “A” “An” and “The” do not count towards the alphabetical order, so the “A” in An Affair to Remember is for “Affair” and when I get to “D” for The Descendants, the “D” will stand for “Descendants.”  Get it?  Now on to the main event.

First up, the letter A!  As you can see by the title of the post and the previous paragraph, I selected An Affair to Remember for my “A” movie.  I was really excited as I love a good love story and Nora Ephron gave it a huge endorsement in her film Sleepless in Seattle.  I live-tweeted the experience.  Here are the details you need to know:

Watched: February 25, 2015 on Netflix

Hashtag: #WatchingAff2Remember

Year Released: 1957

Genre: Romance

Starring: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr

Run Time: 119 minutes

Description (from Amazon): In this poignant and humorous love story nominated for four Academy Awards, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr meet on an ocean liner and fall deeply in love. Though each is engaged to someone else, they agree to meet six months later at the Empire State Building if they still feel the same way about each other. But a tragic accident prevents their rendezvous and the lover’s future takes an emotional and uncertain turn.

I was actually pretty surprised by my reaction to this movie.  Perhaps I’m growing more cynical and sarcastic as I get older, but I found it more ridiculous than romantic.  The dialogue was unrealistic, the situations were contrived, and the plot felt forced.  The two leads did have chemistry (for the most part) and the locations and costumes were beautiful, which were the saving grace of the film.  It made me want to watch more films starring Cary Grant.

Several times throughout the film, I found myself thinking about the changes in cinema from then to now.  The characters seemed so distant, so removed from the audience.  Movies made nowadays feel more intimate, like the audience is allowed to be a part of the action.  It took me forever to figure out character names and careers in Affair, but in modern films, we know those things straight-away.  I probably wouldn’t watch again.

Here’s a sampling of my tweets, but if you want more, follow me on Twitter @RLHammAuthor.