Movie Monday - The Broken Hearts Club

I feel like I should have named this post "The Way We Were."

You see, over the weekend - the second weekend when Christopher has been gone and I've been home with the pup - I watched "The Broken Hearts Club."

If you haven't heard of it - or if it doesn't ring a bell - I won't hold that against you. You see, it came out in 2000, and it's "a romantic comedy" with an almost entirely male cast. In the middle of the movie, they actually talk about the fact that there are no gay movies about "normal gay life" - which, of course, is exactly what they're trying to be.

Amazingly, it has a pretty star-packed cast. It's just that a lot of the people weren't big stars, yet. Timothy Olyphant is the de facto main character, and he's flanked by Zach Braff and Dean Cain, with John Mahoney as the "den mother" of the group of about 5 best friends.

Sure, there's some dating and hooking up and partying that goes on in the movie, but it's more about the friendships of that group of guys than anything else. It's a movie about being just past the point of being "young and cute" but being nowhere near the point of being "middle-aged and sad." Or, in the case of Mahoney's character, being "average" - and being all the stronger for it.

I could wax rhapsodic about the movie for a while longer, but I fear I'll eventually have to admit that one of the main reasons I like it so much is what my life was like when I first saw it.

In 2000, I was living in Baltimore. I wasn't rich or pretty or a club kid or a gym bunny. I didn't have the fabulous - or dramatically tragic - gay lifestyle that a lot of movies (either gay or straight) seemed to think I was supposed to have. I had, for the most part, a really "normal" life. Decent job. Okay life. Amazing friends. A world of potential. (If you watch the movie, you'll know why I mention that.)

I think we all live our lives looking back at some golden period when (in hindsight) everything looks amazing. And I fully admit that there are a few different points in my life that I look at through pleasantly rose-colored glasses. But in the middle of winter, home with the pup while Christopher is on vacation, the memories that "The Broken Hearts Club" brings to mind are pretty amazing.

The best I can hope for all of us, as we bask in the afterglow of movie award season, is that we can each have a movie that takes us back to that place in time when life was good and the world was ahead of us.

And maybe, just maybe, that will propel us forward into a future we never could have imagined all those years before.