If love really meant never having to say you’re sorry, I’d have enough time on my hands to get a PHD.

Yes, the tagline for director Arthur Hiller’s “Love Story” is unforgivably stupid, no question. Almost as bad is Ali McGraw’s performance as the gorgeous but doomed Jennifer. My wife hates this film and MacGraw’s performance so much that she only agreed to screen the Blu-ray with me so that she could delight in Jennifer’s cancerous demise. My wife’s tagline for the film is, “Marrying the studio head means never having to take an acting class.”

So what was it about this fairly mediocre 1970 tear-jerker that made it, not only the highest-grossing film of the year, but also the 6th highest grossing film of all time — the “Titanic” of its day?

Believe it or not, I saw this “chick flick” classic for the first time ever when the Blu-ray screener arrived last week, and thankfully I’m secure enough in my masculinity to admit that the story got to me. You can’t disagree with the film’s critics and their many criticisms, but in the end I’m not completely ashamed to admit that Jennifer’s death choked me up and that I found the third act a little gut-wrenching as that reality became increasingly inevitable.

For everything the story does wrong, it does two key things so right that those moments help to overcome the rest. When, in the middle of a perfect day, Jennifer tells her husband, Oliver (Ryan O’Neal), that she has to go to the hospital, it’s a real kick to the gut. Laugh all you want, but just thinking about it gets to me. And then there’s how we learn that she’s died. (No spoiler warning necessary. We’re told Jennifer will die in the opening scene.)

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Hollywood Values

From the director of “Julie & Julia” over at HuffPo:

I understand that Ryan O’Neal has confessed, in the current edition of Vanity Fair, that he recently failed to recognize his own daughter Tatum at a funeral and accidentally made a pass at her.

Everyone is very judgmental about this, but I just want to say that I sympathize. …

As it happens, Ryan O’Neal had not seen his daughter Tatum in years. He thought she was a Swedish person. I completely understand. … So who’s to judge? Not me.

The woman Ryan O’Neal spent over a decade with and had a child with dies after a long agonizing bout of cancer, he hits on some “Swedish person” at the funeral, and that’s all fine…

What would be wrong is judging that kind of behavior.