Cranky review of Love, Actually

[firecat]

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.

Comments

[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.

[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.)