5 things I hate about being single on Valentine’s day

We have all been there. Love is in the air and there’s a flicker of romance in everyone’s eyes but you’ve just gone through a bad breakup and are a member of the ‘loners club’.

Your friends excitedly make big plans for D-day. They have already bought new outfits to wear along with gifts for their loved ones. But all you can do is listen with a poker face as they share ideas and ask for advice resisting the need to scream. You begin to hate your newly acquired relationship status for various reasons:

5) Paraphernalia
Malls, shops and bookstores are displaying chocolates, teddy bears and heart shaped cards. Sadly, no one who will buy them for you. You can’t buy them for yourself because the shop assistants will look at you with like you are pathetic.

4) Love-obsessed media
Radio stations play love songs which couples dedicate to each other. You, of course, have no one to dedicate anything to. Radio jockeys dish out advice as if they were love gurus. Morning show hosts harp on about the importance of the holiday. They invite happy couples on their shows who share stories which only add to your misery. Watch any TV channel and you’ll see romantic specials. So, be ready to have lots of tissue handy, along with a big bowl of chocolate ice-cream.

3) The colour red
Red is the colour of the day. It is worn by every other person and if you decide to wear black (because it’s your favourite colour), you are looked at with suspicious eyes and that adds to your embarrassment

2) People in general
Your friends and cousins send you Valentine’s day ‘forwards’ through text message even if your facial expression clearly says you are not interested.

1) Pity
Making plans to hang-out with your friends who have dates on the day is a big mistake. The sight of those couples will make you sick.

Source: The Express Tribune Pakistan

On Valentine's Day, 'Pyaasa' among Time's top romantic movies

Indian director Guru Dutt's fifties' classic musical-drama "Pyaasa" has been listed fifth among Time magazine's Valentine's Day list of top Romantic Movies.

For the Feb 14 day celebrating love and affection between intimate companions, "Time.com has a list - from the songs you need to ease the pain to the movies that will sweep you up in a romance nearly as epic as your own"

In picking up "Pyaasa", the Time asked: "Where did classic Hollywood go when it died?"

And itself answered: "To India, where the nation's pop cinema (Bollywood to you) still attends to antique conventions of family fealty, personal integrity and, of course, all-conquering love."

"In this achingly lush tale of a poet whose one true friend is a prostitute, director-star Guru Dutt creates a musical drama as shimmering and ethereal as the poet's verses, as sultry and earthy as Waheeda Rehman, the 20-year-old actress who became Guru Dutt's mistress and muse," Time said.

"'Pyaasa' means 'thirst'; if this film is your introduction to the glamour and heartbreak of Indian film, it'll leave you parched for more," it said.

Here are the top ten Romantic Movies:

* Son of the Sheik (1926)
* Dodsworth (1936)
* Camille (1936)
* An Affair to Remember (1957)
* Pyaasa (1957)
* Jules and Jim (1962)
* Chungking Express
* Moulin Rouge (2001)
* Talk to Her (2002)
* Brokeback Mountain (2005)

David Beckham plans Valentine's surprise

David Beckham is apparently planning to surprise his wife Victoria for Valentine’s Day.

According to The Mirror, the footballer is to take a four-day break from training with Spurs to fly out to New York, where pregnant Victoria is launching her latest fashion collection.

"He has booked a candlelit restaurant in Manhattan for Monday and is planning on whisking her off to Brooklyn Bridge - the inspiration for their eldest son's name," said a source.

The Beckhams have been married for 11 years, but have reportedly not been together on Valentine's Day for the last seven.

Don your hearts’ colours this Valentine’s Day

Its one day to Valentine’s Day and love already seems to fill the air with its blissful sparks. Be it the dazzling red-colored feminine dress or just a shade of innocence with a blush of desire on its lips, Red is surely ‘in’ this Valentine’s Day.

However, in Pakistan, this love-filled day is not celebrated with as much vigour and freedom yet we can see the sparks of it fluttering hither and thither shyly like a newly born butterfly. Young girls anxious to delight their beloved by donning the vivacious color of love yet the fear of family and society stops them of showing their love, still they manage to hide red dupattas inside their college bags and wear them in their secret love-filled shrine. Such is the charm of Valentine’s Day in Pakistan!

However, according to latest Valentine’s Day trends, it’s not necessary to glam up in the mist of red from head to toe, you can be as simple and fresh as a pearl yet some sparks of romantic red will surely express your love to your beloved. Read on to spend your Valentine’s Day with a perfect dress and perfect mood!

You can combine red color with other colors according to your mood. If you are feeling exotic and sensual combine red with silky grey or creamy beige or black, just highlight the other color with splashes of red. For example you can wear red duppatta or red bangles, red shoes or even just a single swipe of spicy red lipstick on your lips will make you look damn hot and off course perfect for Valentine’s Day.

If you are feeling soft and dainty, don yourself with a perfect shade of white or off-white with the color of love peppered up on tiny places, giving extra oomph and spice to your entire aura. If you are feeling bold and sexy opt for vibrant shades of green or purple to fuse and blend with dazzling red for a defiant and vivacious look. Or of you are bold enough to doll up your self entirely with this enchanting color of love, just do it, but with confidence and power of being able to do what you want!

All in all, the key is to look beautiful and sensational without being over and cheep. Just wear the color that reflects your mood and off course your love to fill your moments of togetherness with the warmth and joy of this day.

5 most inappropriate Valentine’s Day movies

Anyone can run out and rent a romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts for Valentine’s Day. Anyone can stream the latest innocuous offering from Drew Barrymore — or Jennifer Aniston, or Kate Hudson.

But it requires real guts to sit down with that special fellow or lady in your life and take in one of these massively uncomfortable choices. So here, without any needless flowery language, are the five most inappropriate movies to watch with someone you love on Valentine’s Day:

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966):
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor chew up the scenery and tear each other apart as the boozy and bickering husband and wife George and Martha. In adapting Edward Albee’s painfully honest play, director Mike Nichols burst onto the scene with this, his first feature (“The Graduate” came the following year). He gets up close and personal to provide an intimate view of the carnage. Burton and Taylor start out slyly needling each other in front of their poor, unsuspecting guests, then humiliating each other, and by the end, they’re threatening all-out war. That they were married to each other in real life — for the first time — only added to the intrigue. Nominated for 13 Academy Awards, it won five, including best actress for Taylor’s scathing performance.

“Closer” (2004):
Another from Nichols, this time adapting a London stage production by playwright-screenwriter Patrick Marber. But it’s reminiscent of “Virginia Woolf” for its intense performances and raw emotions. Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen and, yes, Julia Roberts fall giddily in love with each other, but don’t be fooled: This is the furthest thing possible from a date movie. These inordinately beautiful people do extraordinarily ugly things to one another — Portman, playing a stripper in her first truly grown-up role, commits some of her offenses in little more than a G-string — and the way they destroy each other and themselves is both brutal and breathtaking to watch.

“Blue Velvet” (1986):
Nothing is ever what it seems in a David Lynch movie, and that certainly applies to love, as well. So a severed ear found lying in a field is so much more than just a severed ear — it’s the key to a disturbing, underground world of twisted romance. Beneath a veneer of genteel suburbia, Kyle MacLachlan gets sucked into the bizarre lives of Dennis Hopper as a nitrous oxide-addicted criminal, and Isabella Rossellini as his masochistic sexual slave. Voyeurism and depravity, Roy Orbison and Pabst Blue Ribbon all collide hypnotically here. Lynch alternates between glib satire and a much darker, starker exploration of secret fears and desires.

“Natural Born Killers” (1994):
Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis fall in love and kill people, and fall deeper in love and kill more people, and become media darlings in the process. It’s sort of romantic ... in its own way. Oliver Stone isn’t exactly subtle in his satirical exploration of underserved fame and all its trappings; as is his tendency, he throws everything at us, from various film stocks and frenetic camera angles to an editing style that suggests he cut the film in a Cuisinart. But he was onto something back then, and the thirst for juicy scandal continues to go unquenched, no matter how questionable a person’s actions are.

“Fatal Attraction” (1987):
It’s long since become a shorthand for stalking — for crazy, clingy women who are too delusional to take “no” for an answer. All you have to do is mention boiling a bunny and everyone knows what you’re talking about. But back in its day, believe it or not, people actually took this movie seriously as a suspenseful thriller. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture and best actress for Glenn Close’s indelible performance as a spurned, vengeful mistress. If director Adrian Lyne’s sleek, steamy film has taught us anything, it’s that it is so much easier to stick with your husband or wife than indulge in an afternoon tryst. So maybe this is a good movie to see with the one you love after all

Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine is about a marriage that's slowly, if not quite surely, falling apart, yet the movie is every inch a love story. That's why it stings so exquisitely. Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) have been together for six years, with a daughter they're devoted to, but their lives are a mess. Dean, a softhearted, blustery screwup with a youthfully receding hairline, is a freelance house- painter who likes the work because he can enjoy a beer at eight in the morning. He says so with a boastful grin. In other words, he's trouble. Cindy, a kindly, beleaguered nurse who is looking to move up in the medical world, is sick of his slovenly pursuit of pleasure, his slipshod career options, and his refusal to be an adult. At the same time, we can see what she's drawn to: Dean is sexy, with a slightly saddened little-boy charm, and he's forever working his way back into her good graces. They've turned the addict/enabler two-step into an elegant rehearsed dance.
In one memorable sequence, they take a romantic night off and go to a tacky theme motel, where they're booked into a room with lunar wallpaper and a sci-fi spaceship motif. In this dingy kitsch palace, the two guzzle vodka and mess around (she asks him to get rough — less out of nastiness than nostalgia), fumbling toward the moment when they can feel those old feelings they used to have. Trying to set the mood, Dean puts on a scratchy old soul song. It's ''You and Me,'' a curio from the '70s by Penny & the Quarters, and all we have to hear is a few bars of its warbling sweet plea (''You and me/You and me/Nobody, baby, but you and me'') to know that it's their song and that it's a heartbreaker, because the two probably haven't felt that way in a very long time. As the tune goes on, it sounds more and more achingly beautiful. It becomes the wistful ''our song'' of everyone in the audience.

The young co-writer and director, Derek Cianfrance, works in leisurely long takes, letting the sweet nothings, the bitter battles, the dying embers of romance play out before our eyes. From the start, we may wonder: How did a gentle, sane woman like Cindy end up with a mate so ardently troubled? But Cianfrance has built that complication right into the movie. He cuts back in time to reveal how the two met, folding the past right into the present. Dean wasn't always so addled, and with his full hairline he was ruggedly attractive. Cianfrance stages each scene as another desperate piece in the puzzle of how a couple could find each other this innocently and then get this lost. At moments, watching Blue Valentine is like being at the scene of an accident, yet the power of the movie rests in how easy it is for almost anyone to glimpse them- selves in the elemental passions of these two.

Blue Valentine is lushly touching and gorgeously told. By the time the film is over, you may feel that you know every inch of these lives. That's because Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams act without a net. The two have moments that make you melt, like one where Gosling, on what is basically the couple's first date, stops at a storefront to do an awful/endearing Elvis impersonation, singing ''You Always Hurt the One You Love'' as he accompanies himself on the ukulele, while Williams dances a happy little jig. You can see them spontaneously locking hearts. And both actors have moments that tear you apart, like one set in the doctor's office where Cindy works, with Dean busting into the place to fight with her, and everyone looking at him like he's crazy, and us realizing that he's not crazy but that he may now be a prisoner of his rage, too far gone to stop hurting the one he loves. Gosling plays Dean as a snarky working-class hipster, but when his anger is unleashed, the performance turns powerful. It becomes a scary study in the woundedness of defensive manhood — Raging Bull meets COPS. Williams has the quieter role and maybe the trickier one: Her Cindy has to make choices about how much her feelings for Dean are seriously worth, and the choices keep changing. There are real demons here — in him, and in her, too. Yet Blue Valentine wrenches us with its painful and tender understanding of how people with even this tattered a connection can lunge for love as if it were air.