Serendipity (film)

Serendipity is a 2001 American romantic comedy film, starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale. It was written by Marc Klein and directed by Peter Chelsom. The music score is composed by Alan Silvestri.

Plot

During the Christmas season in New York City, Jonathan Trager meets Sara Thomas trying to buy the same pair of black cashmere gloves at Bloomingdale's. They feel a mutual attraction, and despite the fact that each is involved in other relationships, they end up eating ice cream at Serendipity 3 together, and soon exchange goodbyes. However, both realise that they have left something at the ice cream bar, and return only to find each other again.

Considering this to be a stroke of fate, Jonathan and Sara decide to go out on the town together, and ice skate on the Wollman Rink at Central Park. Jonathan teaches Sara about Cassiopeia, saying that the freckles on Sara's arm match the pattern of the Cassiopeia constellation. At the end of the night, the smitten Jonathan suggests an exchange of phone numbers. Sara writes hers down, but it flies away with the wind. Wanting fate to work things out, Sara asks Jonathan to write his name and phone number on a $5 bill, while she writes her name and number on the inside cover of a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera. If they are meant to be together, he will find the book and she will find the $5 bill, and they will find their way back to each other. Jonathan is not satisfied with this so they go into a hotel with 28 floors and enter into different elevators to see if they both choose the same floor. They each take a single glove from the pair they purchased, and each of them chooses floor 23. A little boy gets on the elevator with Jonathan and presses the buttons, for virtually every floor, causing Jonathan to arrive on floor 23 seconds after a somewhat disappointed looking Sara disappears inside an elevator. The two believe they've lost each other for ever.

Serendipity

Serendipity means a "fortunate happenstance" or "pleasant surprise". It was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754. In a letter he wrote to a friend, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made by reference to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes, he told his correspondent, were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”.

The notion of serendipity is a common occurrence throughout the history of scientific innovation such as Alexander Fleming's accidental discovery of penicillin in 1928, the invention of the microwave oven by Percy Spencer in 1945, and the invention of the Post-it note by Spencer Silver in 1968.

The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. However, due to its sociological use, the word has since been exported into many other languages.

Etymology

The first noted use of "serendipity" (meaning pleasant surprise) in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1797). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Tamil Ceralamdivu, Sanskrit Simhaladvipa and Persian Sarandīp (سرندیپ). Parts of Sri Lanka were under the rule of Tamil kings for extended periods of time in history. Kings of Kerala, India (Cheranadu), were called Ceran Kings and divu, tivu or dheep, which means island. The island belonging to the Chera King was called Cherandeep, hence Sarandib by Arab traders.

Film

A film, also called a movie, motion picture or photoplay, is a series of still images which, when shown on a screen, creates the illusion of moving images due to the phi phenomenon. This optical illusion causes the audience to perceive continuous motion between separate objects viewed rapidly in succession. A film is created by photographing actual scenes with a motion picture camera; by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques; by means of CGI and computer animation; or by a combination of some or all of these techniques and other visual effects. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to the industry of films and filmmaking or to the art of filmmaking itself. The contemporary definition of cinema is the art of simulating experiences to communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty or atmosphere by the means of recorded or programmed moving images along with other sensory stimulations.

The process of filmmaking is both an art and an industry.

Kate Beckinsale

Kathrin Romary "Kate" Beckinsale (born 26 July 1973) is an English actress. After some minor television roles, she made her film debut in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) while still a student at Oxford University. She then appeared in British costume dramas such as Prince of Jutland (1994), Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Emma (1996), and The Golden Bowl (2000), in addition to various stage and radio productions. She began to seek film work in the United States in the late 1990s and, after appearing in small-scale dramas The Last Days of Disco (1998) and Brokedown Palace (1999), she had a break-out year in 2001 with starring roles in the war film Pearl Harbor and the romantic comedy Serendipity. She built on this success with appearances in the biopic The Aviator (2004) and the comedy Click (2006).

Beckinsale appeared in the Underworld film series and has since starred in many action films, including Van Helsing (2004), Whiteout (2009), as well as Contraband, and Total Recall (all in 2012). She also makes occasional appearances in smaller dramatic projects such as Snow Angels (2007), Winged Creatures (2008), Nothing but the Truth (for which she earned a Critic's Choice Award nomination in 2008), and Everybody's Fine (2009). In January 2016, Beckinsale's film for Whit Stillman Love & Friendship premiered at the Sundance film festival.

John Cusack

John Paul Cusack (/ˈkjuːsæk/, born June 28, 1966) is an American actor, producer and screenwriter. Cusack appeared in several teen films in the mid-1980s, most notably Better Off Dead (1985), before he starred in Cameron Crowe's romantic comedy-drama Say Anything... in 1989. He later starred in High Fidelity (2000), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. Cusack is also known for his performances in the films Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), Being John Malkovich (1999), 1408 (2007), 2012 (2009), Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and The Raven (2012).

Early life

Cusack was born to a Catholic Irish-American family in Evanston, Illinois. His mother, Ann Paula "Nancy" (née Carolan), is a former mathematics teacher and political activist. His father, Richard Cusack (1925–2003), was an actor, as are Cusack's siblings Ann, Joan, Bill and Susie. Richard was also a documentary filmmaker who owned a film production company and was a friend of activist Philip Berrigan. Cusack graduated from Evanston Township High School in 1984, where he met Jeremy Piven, and spent a year at New York University before dropping out, saying that he had "too much fire in his belly".