It’s just another soggy Friday where I’m at, which requires something warm, tropical, and hilarious as a remedy. So today’s choice for a fine romance is Robert Zemeckis’ 1984 action-adventure-comedy-romance Romancing the Stone, starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas.

Turner is a mousy, repressed, boring romance novelist, writing about things that’s she’s never experienced. (As we romance novelists do.) She receives word that her sister was kidnapped in South America and rushes to rescue her, only to end up lost in the Columbian jungle, where she meets Douglas. For a price, he agrees to help. What ensues is a grab-bag of action and romance cliches, somehow made fresh because everyone seems to be having so much fun.

I think it’s the fun that missing from contemporary romances. I guess because there’s so much capital tied up in making a movie today everyone is so serious. Romancing the Stone is winking at you — sometimes literally in the guise of Douglas’ joyous performance — and laughing with you.

If the rain keeps up, I’ll be able to reenact the mud slide scene in my backyard, hopefully with something rummy, and suggest you do the same. (Only perhaps minus the mud.)

Sometimes, I don’t need to over-think the romantic film recommendation thing. Sometime, the right selection is clear. And this week, I’m going with the obvious choice: Casablanca, Michael Curtiz’s 1942 masterpiece starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains.

If you haven’t seen it, you really should stop whatever you’re doing and track this film down. Like immediately. No, I’m not kidding.

But if you need more convincing, our setting is Morocco in the early days of World War II. Refugees are streaming out Europe only to end up trapped in purgatory-like Casablanca, unable to get out of the Vichy French-occupied (and thus German-aligned) territory without visas. Two such refugees are Bergman and Henreid. He’s a resistance leader and she’s his wife, a woman whose past with the bar-owner and hard-boiled cynic Bogart is at the center of the film.

Whether Casablanca is a romance or the true film equivalent of romance novel — meaning a courtship-focused narrative with a happily ever after — is an interesting question. (SPOILER ALERT) It ends happily from Henreid’s point-of-view and with the start of  “beautiful friendship” for Bogart and Rains. It also gave Bogart and Bergman closure. So the ending is ambiguous at worse and positive at best. (END SPOILERS) But even if the ending is atypical, it’s deeply romantic, often funny, and always smart.

I don’t believe that the cream rises to the top. The films that endure often stay around through a weird combination of marketing, nostalgia, academic interest, and serendipity. But in Casablanca’s case, the reputation and endurance is earned. I’ll be watching it tonight with some North African food and sangria.

With all that talk about the supermoon earlier this week, there was really only one choice for this week’s fine romance: Norman Jewison’s 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck. Yes, the one with Cher and Nicolas Cage.

It’s about a widow (Cher; yes, really) whose life is finally turning around. She’s engaged to a man who, while she doesn’t love him, is nice. When he goes to Sicily to be with his dying mother, she agrees to try to patch things over with his estranged brother (Cage). He, it turns out, is not nice at all, but not nice in that alpha, bad boy “my hand was cut off by a bread slicer” way (I’m still not making any of this up). They end up having a torrid affair and going to Lincoln Center to see La Boheme. As people do.

There are subplots involving Cher’s family, etc., but really, all I can say to recommend this film to you is that enjoying it is entirely about suspending your disbelief and letting your emotions sweep you away. It’s ridiculous and over-the-top and somehow, that’s precisely how it tells the truth.

If it’s not obvious, I really love Moonstruck. If you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it in a while, my recommendation for tonight is Moonstruck, Chianti, Puccini, and many, many carbs.

It’s the longest day of the year, at least if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere. If I were a darker, meaner person, today’s fine romance selection would be one of the film versions of The Great Gatsby, in which Daisy Buchanan opines, “Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!” But since we haven’t missed it, we’ll have to watch something else. Hopefully something happier! My choice is Barefoot in the Park, a delightful romp featuring Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, and late 60s New York.

It starts with a wedding, that of young lawyer Redford and the Bohemian-aspirant Fonda. After the wedding comes their Greenwich Village apartment, which is truly the third character in the film and the marriage. It might be an atypical romance, but it is a rather adorable film.

I won’t discuss whether any of the DC and Boston apartments we lived in when we were first married might make the film biographically appealing, but I will say that it’s fun and surprisingly fresh. I’ll be watching it tonight with something fizzy and cool and suggest you do the same.