Have to thank my Mom for introducing me to these old movies -- "Madame X," "Imitation of Life" and, this, the all-time favorite Hebert girl chick flick, "An Affair to Remember." Thanks, Mom...
One of my favorite movies is "An Affair to Remember" with Gary Grant and Deborah Kerr. A true "chick flick," the film is about Terri and Nickie who meet on a trans-Atlantic voyage, fall in love, and agree to meet six months later at the top of the Empire State Building to see if they really want to be with each other.
On the way to their meeting, Terry is hit by a taxi cab and paralyzed. She doesn't want to go to Nickie until she can walk to him. However, Nickie thinks she stood him up and is heartbroken. He waits on the observation deck for hours and leaves bitter and disappointed.
He doesn't find out what happened to Terry until the end of the movie and, of course, they live happily ever after.
But this magical and romantic movie never could've happened in today's instant-access technological age. With the invention of cell phones and the Internet, the old movies we've come to love would never fly.
In "An Affair to Remember," Nickie would've texted Terry or, if that didn't work, Nickie could've checked Terry's MySpace status for posts and updates.
Another one of my favorite chick flicks is "Sleepless in Seattle," and Annie did use the Internet to track Sam down. However, instead of using a private investigator to find Sam, Annie could've jumped onto Facebook and found out his birthday, residence and much more by friending him.
Forget meeting at the top of the Empire State Building. Both couples could've created a private online chat room and typed back and forth without ever crossing the continent.
In fact, all the old love movies could be trimmed in half by having the characters join an online dating service, thus completely removing chance and the magic from the movies.
Sappy love movies aren't the only films where modern technology would change the entire plot. In "Star Wars," viewers could've saved so much time if Luke would've gotten an instant message from R2D2, instructing him to download Princess Leia's movie and then sending him a text that Darth Vader was his father.
In "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," modern technology was at the forefront as the U.S. government tried communicating with the extraterrestrials. With the Internet, all those people with the same dream about the Devil's Tower could've set up Websites and YouTube videos and known they weren't alone.
Yes, modern technology would've gotten us to the point a lot faster. But for those of us who love the "boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl" format, nothing beats chance mishaps, letters that cross in the mail and long courtships that cause us to drag out the Kleenex and wallow in a sappy love story.
Some of our best personal experiences revolve around chance and coincidence, and those old-fashioned stories allow us to remember the enchantment of letting a story unfold with the fates directing the outcome.
And just about the time we picture a suave Cary Grant standing in our living room, asking us to dance or Sean Connery requesting our help on a secret 007 mission, the cell phone vibrates.
It's the kids, asking if we can ferry their forgotten homework to school for them. Or it's a sales call, offering us a great deal on a mattress or a reminder text from the dentist about that root canal scheduled for Tuesday.
Perhaps these old sentimental stories are best just the way they are. Sure, today we could sail right through all of life's twists and turns with a practical GPS device and a pocket-sized 4G cell phone, but we'd lose the one ingredient crucial to any good story.
Magic.
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.
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