reviews

PERSONAL REVIEW - Sori

Love Actually: I laughed a bit and loved Colin Firth's story, but overall I was disappointed. I think what bothered me the most was how often Richard Curtis went for the cheap laughs:

1. The fat jokes: they weren't funny, and they were really distracting. In what world is Martine McCutcheon fat? Curvy? Yes, but I guess to Richard Curtis if you don't look like Keira Knightley then you're fat.

2. Colin, the-horny-Wisconsin-bound boy: where was the "love" in this story? It was just about sex. It had its funny moments, but I wish Richard would have cut this story out and spent more time on the better ones.

3. The nudity (e.g., the art gallery, the rock star at the end, and the movie stand-ins), although I thought the stand-ins' story was very sweet.

When these three things are combined with truly excellent, mature and touching storylines (e.g., Laura Linney's and Emma Thompson's), you get a schizophrenic movie. While watching it, I kept thinking that two different people had written the movie: an experienced and successful scriptwriter vs. an idiotic 13-year old boy.

The movie also suffered from a severe lack of editing. I could have done without Kiera Knightley's, Wisconsin boy's and Liam Neeson's storylines (I found the little boy incredibly creepy and the whole step-father/step-son relationship ridiculous. If my mother had died when I was eleven, the last person I would have stayed with would have been my stepfather. I also didn't get the impression that Liam and the kid were close before the mother died, not so close that he would have stayed with his stepfather instead of other relatives. I remember Liam saying something to Emma's character about how the whole stepfather thing didn't seem important until the mother died. This whole storyline left me cold.) If these three had been cut, there could have been greater character development in the others, and the movie could have been truly fantastic. As it is, it's just an occasionally funny mess.

On a positive note, I really liked Hugh Grant in this (usually can't stand him). I thought his dance scene was very funny. I wish it had gone on longer. I loved Bill Nighy and thought his story was sweet (loved the kind of love he and the manager represented). Emma Thompson made me cry, and I loved loved loved Colin Firth! I know I'm biased, but I think they could have made an entire movie just out of Jamie and Aurelia's story. Just add an Aurelia back-story (since we already got Jamie's) and more Jamie-Aurelia interaction! Voila! Plus, more scenes would have made them falling in love more believable.

After writing some of the biggest comedy smashes of the last ten years - Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bean, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary - Richard Curtis is currently king of the castle when it comes to the romantic comedy screenplay. You know you are going to get gags of the highest order from the man who co-wrote four series of Blackadder, and now he has gone one step further, taking directorial duties for the first time. The result is an inevitable worldwide smash hit.

An ensemble comedy on the theme of love in all its variations, this London-set film deals with numerous different interlinked relationships. Hugh Grant plays a new Prime Minister who falls in love with the Number 10 teagirl (an impressive and natural big screen debut from Martine McCutcheon). His sister Emma Thompson worries whether her successful husband (Alan Rickman) is having an affair with his secretary. Meanwhile in Rickman's office, Laura Linney yearns for the love of the chief designer. Colin Firth decamps to France when he finds his wife (WRONG, SHOULD BE GIRLFRIEND) is cheating on him with his brother, and finds love - despite a language barrier - with his Portuguese housemaid (Lucia Moniz). Liam Neeson struggles to help himself and his son over the death of his wife. Keira Knightley, Andrew Lincoln, Rowan Atkinson and Billy Bob Thornton round out a star-studded cast.

All of them are overshadowed however by a hilarious turn by Bill Nighy as a faded rocker desperate to have a Christmas Number One. In many ways, his relationship with his manager (sensitively played by Gregor Fisher) is the glue the bonds the film together, and is both laugh-out-loud funny and eventually quite touching.

The set-up, which consumes the first hour of the film, is neat, sharply-paced and more often than not very very funny. But then Curtis arrives at a problem: no sooner has he outlined each character's situation than he has to think about resolving it. Thus, the second part of the film (notably much less funnier) feels forced, and at times unconvincing.

There is also a feeling that much of the material is simply regurgitating scenes from previous Working Title/Hugh Grant collaborations: Love is all Around from Four Weddings is overplayed; a zany Rhys Ifans character from Notting Hill pops up here and there, and once again the film ends with Grant making a fool of himself on stage in a school (About A Boy). And it's time to declare a moratorium on scenes where solitary characters break into dance - funny for the first ten times in The Full Monty, but actually a bit embarrassing here.

Nevertheless, there is plenty of festive cheer in what is essentially good-natured nonsense, and the film has a positive message much needed in these gloomy times. The box office will ring, the soundtrack will sell and the audience will get more than their value for money and leave with grins on their faces.

TISCALI ENTERTAINMENT

Odd Couplings: Brit Stars Flounder in Singleton Dysfunction
by Michael Atkinson
November 5 - 11, 2003

No critic likes kicking lapdogs (though many semi-secretly enjoy, as I do, punting the occasional Rhodesian Ridgeback), and Richard Curtis's Love Actually is a veritable teacup poodle. It's so lovey-dovey, anything but permissive coos may seem cruel. The word itself is pounded with Pentecostal insistence: love, love, love, lovelovelovelovelove. An old-school romantic with a soft skull and a heart as big as a cement mixer, Curtis here extends the niche he eked out with Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary: love British style, handicapped slightly by corny circumstance and populated by colorful neurotics, one of whom is always Hugh Grant.

In a rare moment of inspiration, Curtis casts Grant as a new, Blairean prime minister—and one sequence pits him, gently, against slimy Texan president Billy Bob Thornton. But all that appears to be on this PM's mind is the curvaceous sweetness of his office servant (Martine McCutcheon), and Grant hems, haws, and ho-di-hos his character's way around the Parliament's corridors of power, wondering how to ask her out. That's just one thin story filament among many: Liam Neeson's bruised widower trying to deal with his love-struck stepson, Alan Rickman's office boss succumbing to his horny secretary's come-ons, Laura Linney as a lovelorn nebbish-ess working up the courage to approach a hunky co-worker, Colin Firth as a hack novelist slowly falling for his gangly Portuguese housekeeper, ad infinitum. Most hilariously of all, Bill Nighy salts up the Christmas-eve-countdown scenarios as a spent, self-loathing rock star making a comeback with a seasonal revamp of his old hit, and his blisteringly honest media blitz stands as the film's only, badly needed chord of cynicism.

Cretinous love songs from yesteryear clot the soundtrack like factory-dumped phosphates. When he isn't overreaching for absurdity, Curtis can write bouncy patter, but each character gets about 60 seconds before the movie jumps deck to the next love-seeker and the next moony pratfall.

(HEY, WHAT DOES THIS GUY KNOW ANYWAY?)

Love Actually (2003)
Love Actually is so sweet that if it were food, it would be banned on the South Beach Diet.
Written and directed by Richard Curtis, the scribe responsible for both-sides-of-the-pond mega-hits Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary, the film captures a similar romantic sensibility, albeit within a different—some might say unfocused—narrative structure.

With eight interweaving story lines, it's impossible to summarize the multiple plots of Love Actually, other than to say the movie addresses every type of love short of that between humans and their pets.

Had Curtis-the-writer not tried to tell so many stories at once, Curtis-the-director might have found a way to examine at least a few of the relationships more deeply. As it stands, only one relationship, that between Alan Rickman's character and Emma Thompson's, has any depth; the rest are mere snapshots.

Curtis has tried to be succinct, but in doing so, he's simply made the portraits too shallow to mean much. Few of these episodes could hold their own as short stories; they're more like illustrated exposition. There are numerous wonderful, poignant moments in the movie, moments to which everyone can relate, but they don't add up to a full story. What's the deal with the porn couple, whose scenes are marvelous but ungrounded in any context? How does geeky Colin (Kris Marshall) wind up with four babes his first night in Milwaukee? Is there really no middle ground for Karl (Rodrigo Santoro), Sarah (Laura Linney), and Sarah's brother? And where are all these people coming from when they get off the airplane in the movie's final scene?

Where Curtis went absolutely right is in the casting. The A-list of actors and actresses is not only a who's who of UK performers, but also they fulfill a psychological role. Because they are familiar, we already, in some unconscious sense, trust that we'll care about what happens to their characters. The performances are uniformly outstanding, but even in a top-notch cast, Thompson and Colin Firth stand out, as does the precocious Thomas Sangster as Neeson's motherless stepson. (Part of his charm, though, is that he's saying lines written by an adult who calculated exactly how cute the words would be spoken by a child). Hugh Grant plays Hugh-Grant-as-Prime-Minister, but he provides a delightfully geeky dance sequence equaled only by Tom Cruise in Risky Business and Chris Eigeman in Barcelona.

Bill Nighy deserves equal acclaim, though his character would appear to be patterned after Robert Palmer, who died suddenly in September. Particularly unfortunate is the otherwise-hilarious video for his wretched Christmas single, featuring women and choreography straight out of Palmer's "Addicted to Love" video.

Only the most hard-hearted and cynical won't find something endearing in Love Actually; however so much of the movie is prone to skeptical mocking that more critical viewers may have written the whole thing off by the time a genuinely touching scene arrives. But anyone who can't feel sympathy for Thompson's betrayed wife needs a trip to Oz (the fantasy one, not Australia or the prison) to find a heart.

— SARAH CHAUNCEY

Love Actually
by our film reviewer Emily Burns


'Love is everywhere,' declares Hugh Grant's familiar murmur over sentimental images of amour going down in an airport arrivals lounge. From the opening scene writer/director Richard Curtis makes it clear that this is a post-September 11 ode to love, aimed at reassuring us that the world is, on the whole, a good place.

In the loosely interlinked stories, Grant plays the British prime minister, who has a crush on his tea lady (Martine McCutcheon). In another part of London his sister Karen (Emma Thompson) is oblivious to the fact that her husband Harry (Alan Rickman) is coming dangerously close to bedding his beautiful young secretary.

Harry's employee (Laura Linney) is leading a merry dance around the colleague she's crazy for but too afraid to tell, while Karen's widower friend (Liam Neeson) is worried about his young son's (Thomas Sangster) depression - until he discovers it's just infatuation he's suffering from.

Then there's writer Jamie (Colin Firth), who has escaped London after he discovers his wife's infidelity, but might just be finding love again with his Portuguese housekeeper (Lucia Moniz).

Meanwhile, a lush bride (Keira Knightley) is oblivious to the adoration of her husband's best mate (Andrew Lincoln), while hapless Colin (Kris Marshall) dreams of heading to America in search of his dream woman, and washed-up rock star Billy (Bill Nighy) is trying to revive his career with a naff Christmas song.

Richard Curtis, the writer of Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones, makes his directorial debut with this film. He's cooked up an imaginary London, whose occupants are wealthy, gorgeous and have fantastically creative jobs.

Naturally, viewing requires a huge suspension of reality, but if you can accept Hugh Grant as the prime minister, then you can take anything. Although the story is sickeningly unrealistic, it's not all fake snow and mulled wine - they do experience some hardships.

Curtis does a good job at keeping the numerous tales together. Yes, it's cheesy and fake and terribly staged but the gags keep coming, even if they're never really hilarious. But the sentiment is a good one, the stories are touching and it does hit the spot. It's set during Christmas, when Britain's acting fraternity get in the festive spirit by doing what they do best, with Grant doing his hopeless fop routine, to McCutcheon resurrecting that charming EastEnders Cockney sparrow, Tiffany, in the shape of tea lady Natalie. Take time out, suspend belief and prepare for a love fest.

THE SUN online

Johnny Vaughn

I DON’T know how Richard Curtis discovered his magic formula for cinema success — he is to the box office what Kylie is to the charts.

While everyone else in the British film industry knocks out one turkey after another Curtis, aka The Man With The Golden Pen, can’t switch on his computer without having a hit.

Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary — they have made hundreds of millions.

But they could all become small beer compared to Love Actually — his latest cash cow (sorry, film), which he also directs.

With Love Actually, Curtis goes into overdrive. The king of the Brit-rom-com is not content with just one love story — he has to write at least six.

Here we have love in every conceivable form: First sight, unrequited, lost, impossible, first, married, falling in and even shallow love.

The movie begins with a Hugh Grant voiceover as people hug and kiss at Heathrow arrivals lounge. The message is obvious — love is everywhere.

This sets the tone of the movie as we are introduced to the various characters. There’s Hugh Grant as a foppish PM more interested in sexing up his tea lady (Martine McCutcheon) than sensitive documents.

Liam Neeson is a recently bereaved husband who has to look after his stepson suffering from the effects of his first crush at school.

Keira Knightley plays a newlywed whose husband’s best pal is in love with her.

Colin Firth is a writer who, while on retreat in France, falls in love with his Portuguese cleaning lady.

Emma Thompson is trying to save her listless marriage to Alan Rickman.

Laura Linney seizes her opportunity to consolidate an office love affair. And Bill Nighy plays a seen it, done it ageing rock star making a gloriously shameless attack on the Christmas No1 spot.

Their stories all come together and Christmas Eve provides the backdrop for the various conclusions.

From anyone else, Love Actually would have you reaching for the sickbag but, as he well knows, Curtis can pull it off like no one else.

A mixture of slick storytelling, good (if, in some cases, totally unbelievable) characterisation, gentle comedy and, above all, a series of sugary endings had me grinning from ear-to-ear like a loved-up teenager.

It’s not all happiness and light though — Curtis is canny enough to know that love doesn’t work all the time and drops a couple of hard luck stories in too.

Love Actually pushes all the right buttons.

Curtis makes films the whole family can sit down to watch, without having to worry that Granny might be offended.

Love Actually — A Richard Curtis film. It does what it says on the tin.

The Christmas movie of the year.