Optional Christmas Viewing 2
4. Love Actually.
This is an interesting little movie fortified with lots and lots of actors including Hugh Grant, 
Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Billy Bob Thornton, Claudia Schiffer, and Kiera Knightley. This huge number of actors is necessary because there are about 12 tangentially-related storylines going on at once, all set at Christmas. The movie is more about love than Christmas, as you might’ve guessed from the title, but it’s still plenty about Christmas.
Here’re the problems with the movie.
Most of the storylines are quite good and entertaining, but there are a couple I just really hate. The one where Liam Neeson is in mourning over his recently dead wife is just depressing pretty much constantly. Also he’s got this cute kid, the kid from Nanny McPhee and Tristan and Isolde and such, and as a cute kid, he’s terribly annoying. So Liam spends all his time alternating between sobbing over his late wife and palling around with this annoyingly cute kid and giving him love advice for the first ¾ of the movie. The last quarter of this storyline is much more bearable, but really if you watch this movie more than once you should just fast-forward through most of this.
Also the whole Laura Linney part. First of all, I can’t stand Laura Linney 96% of the time in any movie she’s in. Second of all, she’s got this mentally not-right brother whom she is compelled to care for. Which is certainly noble and commendable, I certainly can’t find fault with that…but the thing is this.
I’m not sure of the name of the brother’s illness, but it’s the one where the major symptom is an uncontrolled dependency on telephone calls. In this case, it manifests itself by the brother calling Laura Linney without fail every seventeen minutes. And Laura Linney as caregiver is compelled to answer the phone every time it rings. Every time. No matter what’s going on in her life, work, relationship, whatever, doesn’t matter, she must take the call. That is apparently the treatment, that and confinement.
I’m not sure what sort of mental illness this is, but it must be a real pain to suffer from it. I tried diagnosing it in the DSM-IV but I could find nothing about it…maybe I had an old copy. I was trying to find out what exactly would happen if Laura Linney failed to answer the phone once in her life. But apparently it’s very very bad. It’s so bad that when she finally hooks up with the guy she’s loved from the first moment she saw him six years before, who she has just found out has also loved her since he saw her six years before, and they go to a party, and they have a nice dance together, and they go back to her place, and right when they’re about to have sex…she answers the phone. Then a few minutes later, right when they’re about to have sex…she answers the phone. “Oh no sweetie darling, I’m not busy.”
So whatever it is that happens if she were at some point to decide, okay maybe it’s important for me to have some sort of life or something so I’m not going to answer the phone this time, must be pretty freaking catastrophic. Like on a scale of one to ten, Charles Manson being eleven, this would be about a forty.
I guess the point of the subplot is, well don’t you see, there are all sorts of Love, and this is just another example. Okay, granted, it may be Love, but I think you’ll agree that it’s Very Stupid Love.
And so, as such, I hate the whole subplot. And hey, if there really is a disease where you must call your loved one and if they don’t pick up you go into a psychotic murderous rage, then what can I say, I really apologize. But come on. What happens when she’s in an area that has no service? What happens if she drops her cell phone on some concrete? What happens if she gets on, say, an elevator? I mean, come on, idiot, it’s a cell phone. I miss about six calls a day on my cell phone. People say, “Hey, did you get my text? I’ve sent it every day since nine weeks ago.” Uh, no. But I’ve gotten my weather alerts every day without fail. So listen, Laura, at some point, unless British Telecom’s mobile phone service is vastly superior to ours—-as in if you are under the earth in a steel-reinforced concrete bomb shelter you will still have two or three bars of service—-you are going to miss a call from your crazy brother with the wireless fixation at some point.
So why not go ahead and have sex with the love of your life, you dumb stupid dumb idiot. Eventually you are going to bring about the death of your brother by missing a call. So it might as well be for a better reason than you forgot to plug your phone in the previous night.
And after you’ve had sex, open your nightstand drawer and get out the manual for your cell phone and learn how to change the $#%@^# ringtone from the indescribably annoying default. All through the subplot, you hear that one ringtone over and over. It’s the same one that if you hear it more than three times in a day at work, you walk over to the guy that owns it, tap him on the shoulder, and
punch him as hard as you can in the neck until at last he is dead, and then you place his phone carefully on the floor and pick up the computer which up until recently belonged to the guy and viciously throw it down onto the phone. If you watch this movie, you will hear the ringtone and you will say, Oh yeah. That one.
And the last problem is, it’s a very sweet and touching movie. In fact there are 90 sweet and touching moments in the movie that will bring a tear to the eye of the average girl (621 if she is hormonal). I, personally, can withstand only about 88 of those moments. What can I say, I’m apparently a big wuss. So after the movie, it is not unlikely that you will feel emotionally drained. Yes, you will have been entertained, you will have enjoyed more laughs than you would during most movies, but at what cost? I mean, what if someone sees you?
Hmm…looking back you may get the impression that this is not a good movie—-but it is. I just have a few minor complaints, that’s all.
Next: Forbidden Christmas Viewing
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