There is a limit
Still? Still?? When were we ever???
Love Actually at 20: Are we still in love with the controversial Christmas classic?
Who was ever in love with that grating cloying maddening piece of crap?
Richard Curtis’s 2003 festive drama remains a Christmas classic, albeit a controversial one.
The interlinked romantic tales of middle-class characters professing their love at Christmas gets an annual grilling from critics, viewers and even some of those involved in the film, who point out the unrealistic portrayals of love, questionable character decisions and outdated jokes.
“Unrealistic” is putting it extremely mildly. “Insane” would be more like it. The Prime Minister asks for a cup of tea and is instantly pole-axed by the young woman who brings it to him? And that’s love actually? A “writer” dude goes to Italy or Croatia or somewhere to “write” his “novel” and is instantly poleaxed by the young woman who tidies his house? And that’s love actually? A very young guy flies off to the US in quest of grrrlz and hey hey they crawl all over him, giggling madly? And that’s love actually?
Despite the misjudgements and gaffes, what many viewers want from a festive film is what Love Actually provides: easy watching, a cosy Christmas setting and an unabashed celebration of love.
It’s not easy watching though. Granted there’s no work involved, but it’s not easy being tortured. And hello, it isn’t any kind of “celebration of love.” Wanting to fuck a woman on first glance is not the same thing as love. Going all googly-eyed over someone you don’t know and haven’t spoken to is not the same thing as love.
The amount of real love in the film can be debated, but everyone agrees that Grant gyrating The Pointer Sisters’ 1983 track Jump around the No 10 offices is comedy gold.
Nooooo everyone doesn’t! I cringe so hard when Grant starts twitching his bum that I can’t even watch any more.
At other times in the year, we might be more critical of naff storylines, schmaltzy acts of love and out-of-date jokes, but at Christmas we allow ourselves to be lulled by Hugh Grant’s earnest optimism that “if you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love, actually, is all around”.
Nope. Nope nope nope. There are plenty of sappy movies I can allow myself to be lulled into watching without cringing, but Love Actually has never been one of them. It has some decent moments, which is why I can be so specific about its horrors – I have watched bits of it several times over the years. But along with the decent moments it has poke your own eyes out moments, so no. It gets no forgiveness.
My god, It sounds so utterly awful. I’ve never watched it, and I’ve long been puzzled by the polarized reaction it gets. I’ve been around almost as many LA-lovers as LA-loathers. Tempted to finally give in and give it a hate-watch, to see what all the fuss is about. Although Hugh Grant goofy-dancing sounds like something an evil genius AI would conjure up to torture me. You’ve heard of Desert Island playlists. That’s more like my Gitmo playlist.
Isn’t there also a scene where a guy shows up at the home of his best friend and professes his love for his friend’s wife on a series of cue cards?
Yes. It’s as bad as it sounds.
Arty – it’s worth sampling just to see how horrible a thing can be. Much of it is seriously excruciating – so dumb and fake and insulting it’s physically uncomfortable to watch.
Mind you – Bill Nighy is hilarious. I think he’s the only actor who gets through unscathed. Maybe also Emma Thompson.
It’s a dreadful movie. Pure vomit. A waste of good acting talent. Eg Hugh Grant is brilliant in Paddington II, and when he does his final camp dance at the end of the credits, it’s hilarious.
I really enjoy Four Weddings and a Funeral, which is also about love, and has moments of real poignancy about the different types of love – eg the Simon Callow’s character’s funeral and his boyfriend’s eulogy; and the Kirsten Scott Thomas’s character’s confession of her unrequited love for Hugh Grant.
But isn’t that a lot like love, actually?
Okay, I confess I like the movie. I’ve got bad taste and tasteless ethics. As for Hugh Grant’s dance, he thought it was a bad idea, absolutely hated doing it, felt stupid the whole time, and cringes every time he sees it. He was horrified to find out they’d actually stuck it in all the promos.
Hahahahaha he was SO RIGHT.
It sounds so bad, maybe I have to save it for the right person to hate-watch it with. My anti-English Patient.
(Teenaged me got this silly idea in my head that I could not watch The English Patient, which by the trailers and reviews seemed like the most sweeping, epic romance ever, until I found the right man, the Most Romantic Dreamboat, to watch it with. Which never happened. And I’ve still never seen (or read) The English Patient. (Ha! How’s that for love, actually.) But now I’ve got its opposite: a movie whose idea of love is so curdled and twisted, perhaps I shall wait until I’ve found the perfect friend to hate-watch it with.)
Oh well if it’s any comfort I was stonily unmoved by The English Patient, and now all I can remember of it is the absurdity where he emerges from the cave carrying her dead body looking glamorous as a model when she’s been a corpse for months.
Well hey, maybe they’re both good fodder for hate-watches! I might have a double feature on my hands.
It’s nowhere near the cringe that Love Acksh is. Hardly anything is.
I think you’ll find that there’s a huge portion of the population who can’t tell the difference between the comedic and the cringeworthy. A majority of the “comedy” movies I’ve seen are primarily orgies of schadenfreude and fremdschamen. As the ur-example, I submit Meet the Parents. What confuses people is probably that they laugh when they’re uncomfortable, and if they laugh, it must be because something is funny.
I think movie ideas generally dried up sometime in the mid 90s. Christmas movies even earlier, probably the 60s.
Never watched LA, and by the sound of it there are ‘better’ trash movies to watch in any case. I watched the English Patient when it came out. The only things I recall are that it was long, a bit pretentious in a well meaning and intended to be arty way, and glorious scenes of the desert. I like deserts.
I should have finished reading the comments…
Nullius @ 13, a thousand times yes! When I was young I was relentlessly bullied and mocked. Too quiet, too bookish, no father, op-shop or hand made clothes that were out of fashion and never fit right. Such a huge amount of comedy is about shame and embarrassment, and even now it feels too raw for me. I see the moment coming and start to feel anxiety and then I’ll get up to make a cup of tea, check something in another room, anything to be away from it. Not that I expect society to change for my sake, but couldn’t shows that are supposed to be funny be based on something, well, funny?
And no one’s mentioned the desperately unfunny mocking of the Portuguese cleaning lady’s sister for being overweight and obviously someone no man would want?
Ugh I’ve forgotten that bit, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least that it exists.
OB #10 – for those who spot crimes against sense, reason, aviation and history in The English Patient Frederick Forsyth’s review in The Spectator is the definitive guide. He echoes your point about the beautiful corpse.
Extracts:-
We start (according to a flash-up on the screen) in October 1942 with a young man taking off somewhere in a howling wilder ness of desert. Amazingly, he is flying an uncamouflaged, silver-painted Tiger Moth trainer with the registration number of a British flying club. (A minor skirmish called the Battle of El Alamein was in full flow that month in that place.) A glamorous blonde seems to be asleep in the front seat. Within minutes he flies over the world’s most isolated German machine-gun nest, a small foxhole without any life-support system, stuck in a sea of sand miles from anywhere. But these Krauts are real aces; though they can never have seen a Tiger Moth (there weren’t any at Alamein), they recognise it at once and open up with heavy machine- guns. In mid-air the bullets turn into cannon shells, leaving clusters of black flak over the blue sky. Disdaining to take evasive action, our hero is shot down. Of the blonde we see no more (yet), but the flier is burned to a human crisp. The Germans are pretty blasé, since they decline to investigate the wreck, but some inspiringly compassionate Bedouin wrap him in blankets and take him by camel to the nearest British RAMC post, a tented dressing station.
Montgomery’s High Command then does something weird. We do not see it, but it must have happened. They take this helpless human wreck and, instead of shipping him back to Blighty on a Red Cross convoy, ran him up to Alexandria, then down to Benghazi, across the Med to Sicily, across the island, over the Straits of Messina, through Calabria, past Naples and Rome and up to the fighting front in northern Tuscany. God knows why.
Anyway, we see the long-suffering flier, still in searing agony, bumping along in another lorry, coming south from the fighting line with a bunch of freshly wounded Tommies. It is now October 1944. The convoy hits a minefield in the road, amazingly untouched considering how many divisions of the Eighth Army must have marched over it heading north. The nurse in charge (Juliette Binoche) decides that her human crisp can take no more of being schlepped up and down the Italian peninsula, even less being ferried from continent to continent. I was not surprised; the crisp has by now clocked up more miles than Thomas Cook.
…..
Through more flashbacks, we learn that since 1938 he has been one of the group of upper-class Hooray Henries mysteriously ‘mapping the desert’ of Egypt, whisked about their tasks not only by the trusty and incredibly long-range Tiger Moth but also by an American . . . stunt plane. They have jolly evenings round the camp- fires and occasional furloughs in the pre- war elegance of Cairo. In this environment Almasy fails in love with the wife of a colleague, and on Christmas Eve 1938 gives her a right seeing-to in an office while a group of Jocks celebrate outside.
…[skip a lot to the plane crash]
But, alas, his wife, the lovely Kristin Scott Thomas, was in the front seat, and is cruelly wounded. Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) carries her to the cool of a cave, can do nothing for her, so sets off for help. For some reason (again, God knows which one) his Tiger Moth has been flown somewhere else, leaving him in the midst of nowhere without a jeep or truck to his name. So he walks, in temperatures of 120 plus, until he comes to an Arab village with some Tommies in it. He appeals for help. They refuse to believe he is not German, beat him up and lug him off to clink, (Don’t ask, but for someone in a war zone he has no dog-tags or other identification.) Back in Tuscany, it is now May 1945, VE Day. Celebrations. …Back in the desert we finally reach one of the climaxes. Escaping from durance vile, our hero discovers the village where his colleague parked the trusty Tiger Moth. Incredibly (most things abandoned in an Arab village become gutted skeletons in ten minutes) it is in perfect nick, fully fuelled and starts at the first kick. Away he flies back to the cave, but too late. Not surprising; he has been missing for several weeks.
…
Miss Scott Thomas is very dead but looks amazingly glamorous considering the heat, flies, ants, maggots and other little critters that usually attend demise in the desert. Sadly the flier picks her up, dumps her in the front seat of the Tiger Moth and takes off. Ah, now we are back to square one of three hours earlier. He leaves the mountains and flies over the sand-dune sea in the midst of which that damn machine-gun nest is waiting.
http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/29th-march-1997/17/impatient-with-the-english-patient
Hahahahaha so it’s all as absurd as the one bit I remember.
I managed to sit through The English Patient but remember very little of that story. I haven’t ever had the urge to watch Love Actually and didn’t know it was controversial, a classic, or Christmas. I think I saw a trailer for it back at the time but it didn’t look like something I would like. From the descriptions here, I am convinced of that. I don’t think I’ll hate watch it…I’ve had enough of hating movies I somehow get snookered into watching to want to do it on purpose.
I won’t be watching it either, it sounds like a couple of hours better spent reading or walking.
Both of those are good; also writing and photography. I have lots of things to do with my hours.
We all do; shall we list them all? Nah, that’s ok, I think we can take it as read.
I’ve always resisted “it’s so bad it’s good” ironic watching of anything because (a) what a waste of time, why not watch something that’s so good it’s good; and (b) it’s a bit mean, watching something to feel superior. However I have taken up a little hate-watching of eg Rings of Power, because you can find other hate watchers on Youtube and feel your pain together at this travesty of story-telling in general and Tolkein in particular.
I’ve never been into “so bad it’s good” ironic watching of anything because I don’t like bad things. I’ll watch mediocre stuff if I’m feeling lazy, but bad, nah. Life’s too short. Still, group hate-watching sounds kind of fun…
I do enjoy bad movies, but only if they’re on MST3K (for those not in the know, that’s Mystery Science Theatre 3000). Most of those movies I wouldn’t be able to sit through without anesthetic, but the jokes and the puns make the show fun.
Well if we’re going to hate-watch shitty movies at the inaugural B&W get together, then that’s another thing altogether. ;)