The New Happily Ever After

Cinematherapy for Lovers
by Nancy Peske, Beverly West

Movies are more than entertainment...
They're couples therapy!

If you've ever wondered how to meet Mr. Right, boot Mr. Wrong, inspire Mr. Reluctant to propose, or ignite youthful passion in a middle-aged romance, then we've got some good news for you.

The help you need is no farther away than your remote control. Sink into your sofa and discover the healing power of movies. From the bestselling duo who brought you Cinematherapy, Advanced Cinematherapy, and Bibliotherapy comes Cinematherapy for Lovers, a video guide guaranteed to help you find the perfect movie prescription to cure all your relationship woes.

Trouble in your couple's paradise? Watch a Rediscovering Your Dream movie like Pollock and rise above.

Looking for the key to your guy's psyche? Crack the code with an Understanding Your Man movie like Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and unlock the secrets of your own international man of mystery!

Ready to hear those magic words but your summer lover is terminally tongue-tied? Loosen his lips with a Hook, Line, and Sinker movie like All That Heaven Allows, then find the shortcut to his heart through his stomach with Bev's Culinarytherapy recipe for meat loaf and mashed potatoes just like Mom used to make, and seal the deal.

Feeling like a solo singer in a world full of duets? Discover a new happily-ever-after with a Make Your Own Music movie like Ghost World.

Jam-packed with over 150 new reviews of classic and contemporary movies — and warnings about Happily Never After love stories that are recipes for relationship disasters — Cinematherapy for Lovers gives you the tools you'll need to become your own couple's cinematherapist.

PLUS: Nancy's Momentous Minutiae, Best Bodice-Ripping Lines, I Do I Do and Elvis Too, Always a Bridesmaid Never a Bride movies, Bods We Don't Buy, the Shirley MacLaine Trilogy of Terror, Bev's Culinarytherapy, and much, much more...

Chapter 1

Make Your Own Music Movies

If you're feeling like a solo singer in a Captain and Tennille world, and you're beginning to sound a little off-key, retune your instrument with one of these Make Your Own Music Movies, where happily ever after doesn't always involve a march down the aisle into an off-screen married utopia.

These movies help us to understand that sometimes a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do in order to reach her own happy ending — which may or may not involve a lace-trimmed white gown, a coterie of gals in blushing and bashful pink, and a guy in a matching cummerbund. And if achieving happiness means leaving your fiance in the lurch and going off to London, Paris, or Tokyo to discover yourself, or standing your ground solo right here at home, then so be it. These alternative happy endings remind us all that the only true happily ever after involves making our own dreams come true, and that the only way to achieve harmony with someone else is to find the melody in our own hearts.

Ghost World (2001)

Stars: Thora Birch, Steve Buscemi, Scarlett Johansson
Director: Terry Zwigoff
Writers: Daniel Clowes, Terry Zwigoff, based on the comic strip Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

While riding off into the sunset on a broken-down bus headed for parts unknown with only a hatbox for company may seem like a dubious metaphor for a happy ending, in Ghost World, a movie adapted from Daniel Clowes's comic book of the same name, this lonely image is a heartening reminder that if we wait long enough at the bus stop of fate, our destiny will eventually arrive. And while the future is always revealed one local stop at a time, if we maintain our faith in ourselves and our journey, wherever the bus stops we'll always be home.

Enid (Thora Birch) is woefully out of step with the suburban strip mall wasteland that she calls home. She doesn't fit in at high school graduation (in fact, she finds out at graduation that she has to go to summer school in order to get her diploma). She doesn't fit in at the prom, she doesn't fit in hanging out at the local convenience store, she doesn't fit in even in an art class (and she's an artist), and, perhaps hardest of all, she no longer even fits in with the one oasis of companionship she's found in her lonely, teen-angst-ridden desert: her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) and their plan to get jobs, find an apartment, and move in together after graduation.

As this first summer of their independence unfolds, everything goes according to plan for Rebecca, who presents a far more socially acceptable picture to the world. Rebecca quickly finds a job in a local coffee bar, a boyfriend, and ultimately, an apartment for her and Enid to move in to. Not so for Enid, whose path turns out to be a long and winding road that does not lead to Rebecca's door, or indeed to anything even remotely resembling normal post-high school teenagedom. Confined to the outskirts of small-town society, Enid experiments with ironical and asymmetrical and sometimes downright startling fashion statements, dabbles in random displays of confrontational performance art, and strikes up an intense and insular relationship with some guy named Seymour. Seymour (Steve Buscemi) is a middle-aged fried chicken franchise middle manager, who harbors a passion for collecting vintage records and whose fashion statements are as startling as Enid's only without the sense of irony, and who looks like, well, Steve Buscemi.

As the demand for purpose and direction widens into a deep chasm in Enid's life, her options keep narrowing until she is stuck between a rock and the hard place of her own eccentric worldview. Finally, when all of the obvious choices elude her, Enid at last finds the courage to turn her back on the claustrophobic horizons of small-town normalcy, and board her bus to nowhere and everywhere.

If you're feeling like you've been waiting forever at the bus stop of life for a lift into your future, and you're beginning to wonder if your route has been canceled, watch Ghost World and remember that meaning, redemption, and yes, even love will eventually pull up to the curb and open the door for you, so long as you don't lose faith and leave the bus stop before the Greyhound of your destiny arrives.

The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)

Stars: Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons
Director: Karel Reisz
Writer: Harold Pinter, based on the novel by John Fowles

Okay, so she's the scarlet woman of Lyme, whom the townsfolk in their kinder moments refer to as "poor Tragedy," and she's forced to sell herself into indentured servitude to the most sour-faced matron ever to haunt the drawing room of a nineteenth-century British film adaptation (and that's saying a lot). But does that mean that a girl can't rise to the occasion and become a self-actualized heroine for the new millennium and discover her artistic center? Not in this big-budget period piece starring Meryl Streep as Sarah Woodruff, a caped, hooded, and distinctly gothic metaphor for abandonment issues and the Victorian victimization of women. And yes, she has a very convincing English accent.

Sarah stalks the ramparts on the wrong side of town, waiting for a ship that will never come in, and reminding us all that while sticks and stones may not break our bones, invitations to the hotel rooms of wounded but still randy — not to mention married — French officers can definitely hurt us, no matter how handsome they look in their epaulets.

Rather than remain a victim of the small town's enactment of their collective psychosexual dysfunction, however, Sarah enlists the support of a handsome, albeit somewhat bookish, aristocrat, Charles (Jeremy Irons), and finds her way to freedom from the needs, desires, and prejudices of men and relationships.

This is a great movie to watch when you're feeling abandoned on the jetty of your own unrealized expectations of love, and there are no white sails on the horizon. The French Lieutenant's Woman will encourage you to believe that there is a happily ever after waiting for you, as soon as you find the strength to row your own boat to shore.

Copyright © 2003 by Nancy Peske and Beverly West. Excerpted by permission of Delta, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Nancy Peske and Beverly West are best friends, identical cousins, and the coauthors of Advanced Cinematherapy: The Girl's Guide to Finding Happiness One Movie at a Time, Cinematherapy: The Girl's Guide to Movies for Every Mood, and Bibliotherapy: The Girl's Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives. They live in New York City.