Natalie Portman is currently starring in the very dark, very adult film, Black Swan. But flashback to 1996, and she was a bright-eyed actress playing a wise-beyond-her-years preteen named Marty in Beautiful Girls. Even though Portman was still relatively unknown at the time, I remember being completely charmed by her performance in the film. In one of my favorite scenes, Marty suggests to Will (Timothy Hutton), that they get together — five years down the road, of course. Is her May-December flirtation wrong? Sure, but it's also kind of sweet. Watch the clip again.
Buzz In: What's Your Favorite Movie Sing-along Scene?
Sigh. Movie sing-alongs. They are so good. When Top Gun was first out, if I wasn't head-over-heels for Tom Cruise already, his belting out of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" to Kelly McGillis would have sealed the deal.
And come on, who didn't want to run down to their local dive bar, take some shots and belt "Sweet Caroline" after that fantastic scene in Beautiful Girls? Also, I will never tire of the part in My Best Friend's Wedding when that gorgeous man, Rubert Everett, kicks off an all-restaurant sing-along to "Say A Little Prayer for You."
For me, sing-alongs can take a good scene and make it the best scene. They tap into that basic human desire to break into spontaneous song and dance when the mood strikes. OK, maybe that's just my basic desire.
So tell me, what's your favorite sing-along scene of all time?
After the jump, I just had to include the clip from My Best Friend's Wedding (note the people waving their lobster claw arms in the background toward the end!), so read more
What's Buzzworthy? Comfort Movies
Watching challenging films is a worthy goal, but sometimes, I just want to relax with a movie I've seen a zillion times before. My comfort movies may not be the best or smartest movies in my collection, but they're perfect for curling up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and mentally reciting the lines I've heard a million times before.
So for this week's Buzzworthy challenge, I'm asking you to bookmark your favorite comfort movies, the most trustworthy films in your collection. I'm starting you off with Beautiful Girls, a movie I've seen more times than I could count on my fingers and toes put together. All through college, I toted around a VHS tape with a recording of it from my parents' TV; then, I upgraded — slightly — to a beat-up official version I bought from eBay. I finally got the movie on DVD a couple of years back, and I still pull it out every time I just want to watch something familiar. For good measure, I've tossed in a couple of my other standbys, Laurel Canyon and Drop Dead Gorgeous.
Just use BuzzSugar's cool bookmarking tool to find your favorite comfort movies from around the Web, tag them with the phrase comfort movies, and let me know why you love keeping them around. I'll post some readers' favorites here next week.
You can also now make a list of your picks. Here are mine:
Movie Night: Holiday-ish Films
So many movies, so little time. Thankfully, BuzzSugar is here to help you sort through them all! Each week, we'll choose a theme for a Movie Night and feature three must-see movies in keeping with that theme. This week's theme: holiday-ish films.
There are two types of holiday films. The ones, like Deck the Halls, that are entirely driven by holiday-based plots, and movies like The Holiday, where the action just happens to unfold over a holiday backdrop. Here are three of my favorite holiday-ish films that are fun to watch this time of year.
Love Actually

Nothing puts the warmth and cheer of the season into your heart quite like a film all about love in its various forms. Love Actually brings us many love-centric storylines at once: There are the coworkers awkwardly courting, the little boy whose world revolves around his beautiful classmate, the new marriage threatening to become a love triangle, and the old marriage starting to show cracks in its foundation. The wonderful cast (Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson, Keira Knightly, and Laura Linney, to name just a few) is stellar enough to make the movie truly enjoyable, and it's even more fun to see how the stories intersect. And if you're anything like me, the real footage of people greeting loved ones at the airport in itself will be enough to get you all misty-eyed.
To see the rest, read more