Just in time for Valentine's Day viewing: Romantic movies from An Affair to Remember to Weekend

If you're looking for a movie to see with your sweetie on Valentine's Day, I offer some suggestions at CultureMap -- Houston's daily digital magazine -- and on Great Day Houston (above) with the lovely and talented Deborah Duncan.

Great minds think alike

I'm very glad to see that both Roger Ebert and Stephen Holden more or less agree with my take on Management, a slight but likable dramedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn that signals a promising directorial debut for playwright-screenwriter Stephen Belber (Tape). As I noted last fall in my Variety review from the Toronto Film Festival, Management is a low-key romantic comedy that "pivots on a serendipitous encounter between Sue (Aniston), a stressed-for-success sales rep for a company specializing in 'corporate art,' and Mike (Zahn), an aimless guy in his early 30s employed by his taciturn father (Fred Ward) and ailing mother (Margo Martindale) at an Arizona roadside motel where Sue providentially checks in." The movie offers an appealing mix of whimsical quirkiness, straight-faced absurdity and affecting melancholy. Better still, as Holden notes, it "has a generosity of spirit that makes you believe that good people summoning a lot of pluck can make good things happen."

Good reading: David Denby on rom-coms, from It Happened One Night to Knocked Up

Bless his heart: David Denby of The New Yorker remains one of the few gainfully employed film critics of our age with the insight, intellectual heft, movie-history savvy and graceful writing style to produce provocative and engrossing essays such as this one on the current state of romantic comedies. Mind you, it’s the sort of lengthy piece that is best savored away from the computer monitor: You should print out the article, or maybe even buy the magazine, and page through it at your leisure, perhaps while Mozart wafts from your stereo and a glass of fine wine is within easy reach. But, then again, since he spends so much time focused on Knocked Up – about which Denby expresses profoundly mixed feelings – perhaps you could substitute an ice-cold beer or a tightly-wrapped doobie for the vino.

BTW: According to early weekend box-office reports, Knocked Up (which, Denby rightly notes, “feels like one of the key movies of the era — a raw, discordant equivalent of The Graduate forty years ago”) has grossed enough to remain in the top ten for the eighth consecutive week. Not shabby at all.