Ahem.

[ziggy1278]

Love Actually is a terrible, horrible movie, and someday I will write an epic 10 page essay on why this is a fact, not an opinion (I will release this essay on the same day I release my other, highly anticipated essay, "Why Transformers Sucks No Matter What Your Friends or Loved Ones Tell You

Comments

[jlh]

All of his movies are manipulative. "I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love me"? Come on. And there always seem to be frantic chase scenes at the end. Why?

The naked stand-ins are everyone's favorite part. For me the trouble was, he had all these love stories and didn't want to bother to write the part that modern writers of romantic comedies always bitch about, that is, the "barrier" to the couple not just getting together in the first place. And they say that modern romance doesn't have the societal barriers. But we're talking the 30s and 40s here, so I'm not sure what that's about. Also, half of them were comedies of remarriage, so the couple absolutely had already slept together. The actual barrier (at least, in the ones that aren't musicals, which are different) is almost always that they have issues, internally or with each other, and they have to fix them in order to get together. I mean, in The Apartment the thing the couple have in common is that they each tried to kill themselves over a previous romance, and they think of themselves as losers.

So what we get are these tiny little stories that have to have ridiculously manipulative payoffs because the movie itself didn't earn our emotion by actually making us care about these characters. I mean, the Hugh Grant dancing sequence is fun, but what does it tell us about him, or how he connects with the catering manager chick?

A few weeks ago I had it on the tivo and it took me about 25 minutes to watch, ff'ing through the plots I hate and only watching the ones I like (Liam and the kid, Hugh and the girl, naked stand ins, and Billy Mack and his manager). And you know, when I watched it again, Liam and the kid is mostly just cuteness. I'm prone to like Hugh and the girl mostly for her verbal diarrhea and all the discussion about her body type being his type. And Billy Mack is basically slash. So the only story that I liked without it having pushed my personal buttons is the naked stand ins, and that's the only one that really stood up when watching it again.

The other five plots are HORRIBLE for various reasons and I pretty much refuse to watch them, though I let Alison torture me with them a week or so ago just because I was trying to be nice. But I wouldn't again.

Yeah, I know, I've written a lot but romantic movies and their plots are actually something I care about and have made a good deal of study of, and I hate how so many modern ones are so badly done.