firecat | Cranky review of Love, Actually

I don't much care for Love, Actually and I always thought it was because, before I saw it, a fellow Rickmanista told me it was the greatest film in the whole world, so I had high expectations that weren't met. But this gets at some other reasons why I don't much care for it. (These reasons also apply to most romance plots, filmed or told in other media.)

http://m.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/-em-love-actually-em-is-the-least-romantic-film-of-all-time/282091/

...it offers up at least three disturbing lessons about love. First, that love is overwhelmingly a product of physical attraction and requires virtually no verbal communication or intellectual/emotional affinity of any kind. Second, that the principal barrier to consummating a relationship is mustering the nerve to say “I love you”...and that once you manage that, you’re basically on the fast track to nuptial bliss. And third, that any actual obstacle to romantic fulfillment, however surmountable, is not worth the effort it would require to overcome.

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/818849.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ironed_orchid

Thanks for the link.

I find it has some cute bits, but they are completely outweighed by the awful ideas about how romantic love works.

From:

lovepeaceohana

Aw poop, I'm totally one of those people who watches it every year as a holiday tradition. :( Write it off as wish-fulfillment maybe? That it'd just be nice if love could be so photogenic and simple and bearing its own beautiful musical score?

From:

firecat

That makes sense! And I certainly don't judge people for liking it or any other "it would be nice" story.

From:

lovepeaceohana

Ahaha, thanks :3 It's just, yes, the reviewer has a point! Several of them! Good ones! And yet I still get ridiculously moopy over this movie.

From:

jae

I didn't care for it, either. I wanted to like it, but each of the plotlines felt like it was given short, overly simplistic shrift somehow.

I don't know how you feel about subtitles, but you might like "Alles is liefde" better--it touts itself as the unofficial Dutch version of "Love, Actually", but I think it's a much better film. It's still a romcom with a bunch of unashamedly unrealistic bits and an unswerving commitment to Twue Wove, but the characters feel much more like real people, and the story makes each of them responsible for their shit.

-J

From:

jae

Little bits you might like: it has a gay male couple just thrown in there as one of the love stories without any sort of fuss. And bonus LARPing! :D

-J

From:

firecat

Subtitles are a necessity! And that does sound better than Love, Actually. Thanks!

From:

jae

Subtitles are generally a necessity when you don't speak the language, yeah! :) I just didn't know how you felt about watching things in foreign languages that required you to use subtitles (some people don't like that).

-J

From:

firecat

No, I mean I usually prefer subtitles even when I'm watching English language media. As for foreign media, I've always been in the subs not dubs camp.

From:

jae

Oh, I definitely prefer subtitles to dubbing, but in my experience it's not generally either-or when the language it's being translated into is English, and subtitles are much, much more common.

-J

From:

lilacsigil

I didn't think it was so much about love as about attraction, and on that level it was kind of fun (and I really liked the stepfamily story and most of the actors). But I didn't know it was a Christmas classic or an anything classic!

From:

firecat

That's a good read. I suppose Attraction, Actually wouldn't have sounded appealing.

From:

kalmn

Truly, Madly,Deeply is fairly good on those points, and was my first rickman movie.,it misses the third, but, uh, it's a pretty good sized obstacle.

From:

firecat

I agree completely.

From:

firecat

My favorite Rickman romcom is Blow Dry.

From:

snippy

Mine too.

From:

meganbmoore

...

I am so glad I never had any interest in that movie, despite many recommendations.

From:

submarine_bells

I watched once in an idle moment while visiting the inlaws. I found it rather a disappointment: I'd seen other comedies by the same writer and enjoyed them, so when "Love Actually" turned out to be IMO not only rather unfunny but fairly boring... well, I'd been hoping for something better. Perhaps if the writer had stuck to one or two of the stories and developed them with a bit more depth it would have interested me more. But as it was? Five thousand moving parts going in no particular direction. The occasional ok moment, but my overall feeling at the end of it was a resounding "Meh."

From:

legionseagle

It's a shame he didn't also mention how relentlessly hetero-normative Love, Actually is, while he was at it, which was for me the dominant issue I had with it coming out of the cinema (along with the annoyed point that both drums and foreign languages take a lot longer to learn than that and the whole framing of it around Christmas causes massive time compression problems - for example, it suggests Leeson's character is remarkably shallow). Oh, and he nails the creepy stalker sub-plot; I've literally not been able to watch Andrew Lincoln in anything since where he's not been intended to be a villain.

Though I liked the lobster joke.

From:

zeborah

On the DVD there's a deleted scene with a lesbian couple. It was totes not deleted because they're lesbian, oh no oh no. Random happenstance.

(Ah, it's also on YouTube including the official explanation for why it was deleted, which is that another scene introducing the character had also been deleted.)

From:

shanaqui

Which is—and please believe that I am being as diplomatic as I can—utterly insane.

And that was the line at which I lost interest in this person's analysis...

(I don't think I've ever even watched Love Actually all the way through, I have no attachment to it, but flippant judgements about sanity based on liking of a film? Yeah, no.)

From:

firecat

Good point, that's really offensive.

From:

shanaqui

Yeah, I went "wah... whaaaat" when I read that line.

From:

onyxlynx

YOU WILL NOT TAKE THE GIFT-WRAP SCENE AWAY FROM ME!

OK. Good. I have to admit here that I invented backstory for the characters like whoa (for example, that Emma Thompson's character was best buds at uni with Liam Neeson's late wife) and incorporated the deleted scenes. Basically, I take it as an extended fairy tale. Magic beans, beanstalks, giants. The octopus costume!

Also, there should be more weddings with Beatles music. (I am agnostic about the Bay City Rollers, and that's a Four Seasons cover anyway.)

(Andrew Lincoln's character made me itch more in the race department than the stalkery.)

From:

firecat

:D Invented backstories save so many movies.

From:

ladythmpr.livejournal.com

Love, Actually seems to be one of those movies that one loves, or that one hates.

I and one of my live-in partners really like this movie, and do watch it as a holiday tradition. (The other LIP hates the Rickman storyline, and tends not to watch with us for that reason.) We know about all its foibles, and like it anyway.

In one of the critique's comments, the commenter states that the movie might originally have been 2 or more hours longer. I agree, and some of the deleted scenes on the DVD help bear that out. I think they did wimp out, though, in cutting the lesbian storyline. We thought it was sweet, and added another dose of bittersweet realism.

From:

firecat

That's a shame, yeah. Glad you got to see the deleted scenes.

From:

cakmpls.livejournal.com

I think this reviewer missed a great deal. I offer here just two examples.

"There are other subsidiary relationships ... Linney’s needy, institutionalized brother)." Linney's relationship with her brother is not subsidiary; it, and not her relationship with her colleague, is the primary one, the one that is about love.

"Firth and Moniz, meanwhile, fall in love despite not sharing a word of language in common. Moreover, the movie telegraphs very clearly that the moment when Firth really falls for Moniz is when he watches her strip down to her underwear." IF that's the moment he falls in love with her--I don't think it is--it isn't because she strips down to her underwear, it's because she does so to rescue his manuscript from the lake. These people spend a great deal of time together, and one can learn a lot about another person--enough to fall in love--without words. For some people, what we DO speaks much louder than what we SAY.